


Tale of Years: 2003

by Jessica314



Series: Tale of Years [1]
Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Canon, F/M, Prequel, gapfiller
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:55:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 30,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25610932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jessica314/pseuds/Jessica314
Summary: In 2003, the Cullens return to spend a few years at one of their favorite locations: the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. Who knows what Fate might have in store for them here? Can be read alone or as the eighth installment in the Tale of Years series. Canon-friendly Twilight prequel, Edward POV.
Relationships: Alice Cullen/Jasper Hale, Carlisle Cullen/Esme Cullen, Emmett Cullen/Rosalie Hale
Series: Tale of Years [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1856386
Comments: 15
Kudos: 28





	1. Two is Company, Twelve's a Crowd

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to Tale of Years! After years of only posting on FFdotnet, I'm just beginning to put my Twilight fanfiction here on AO3. I've always been especially interested in the prequel timeline and in exploring how our favorite characters came to be who they are today. Edward has always been my favorite character, so the main Tale of Years stories are in his POV. In my "Tale of Years: Prequel One-Shots and Outtakes" you'll see one-shots in various points of view (Cullen and otherwise) as well as outtakes to the main stories. I hope you enjoy the ride... and please take a moment to review! Feedback from readers makes for better writing and makes the whole process more fun for all of us!

**June 2003**

**Mt. McKinley, Alaska**

**Edward POV**

The snow around me was indifferent to my presence. My skin was just as cold, collecting the tiny crystals by the thousands as I lay motionless, watching the stars come out one by one. The quiet sounds of nature hummed a restful overture, muffled by distance and the icy blankets draped over every surface of the mountain. High above its peak, a dazzling show of twisting reds and greens adorned the sky. Another breathtaking nightfall in the Alaskan wilderness.

I watched the moon sketch its usual graceful progress across the dark sky, unimpressed. Even the pair of shooting stars that broke the monotony around 2:00 in the morning were old news; Alice had cheerfully ruined the surprise earlier this evening. A third was due in a few minutes, but I let my eyes drift closed, unable to care. I had seen it all before. But I would no doubt find myself out here again tomorrow night, eager for solitude. Anything to get away from the crowd of minds at home.

We hadn't planned to move in with the Denalis, per se; it was only supposed to be an extended visit while we waited for Rosalie and Emmett to come back from the honeymoon tour of Europe they had taken upon our departure from Maine. Their spur-of-the-moment wedding had completely stalled our plans, but we still wanted to move on all together when the time came. And we hadn't yet decided on our next destination, so it seemed as good a time as any to pay our cousins a long-overdue visit.

By the time the happy newlyweds had come home, it was so close to Christmas that there was no stopping Alice and Tanya. The lodge and the main house were transformed into a glittering, gaudy wonderland that burned out the generator every other night. Soon afterward, tax season began to loom. Even with a good chunk of our identity management load now shifted onto Jenks and his questionable associates, it was no time to start over. The move was delayed again.

Now it was early June, and we hadn't budged. I supposed it was my own fault; when Carlisle had grown restless back in January I had suggested that he start working a few shifts a week at the clinic in Cantwell. Then Irina, who was the public face of the Denalis at the moment, decided to attend a series of economics lectures with Alice. That had turned into their signing up for a regular class down at AUF. Rosalie had naturally felt slighted and convinced Tanya to take a class with _her_ , and then Emmett had tagged along, and here we were tangled up for an entire semester.

It hadn't been so bad at first. Rosalie and Emmett had taken the guest suite in the main house, so the lodge was relatively quiet, conventionally speaking, if still a little cramped. The mornings were especially peaceful once the college classes had gotten underway. Carlisle seemed to be enjoying his work at the clinic, and of course Esme and Eleazar had begun work to expand the lodge. I resigned myself to living with eleven minds for the time being; it wasn't as bad as I had feared. Wanting our continued company, Tanya had been working hard at _not_ mentally undressing me on a nightly basis, which I greatly appreciated, and everyone had enough to do that we weren't all stepping on each other's toes. Not much, anyway.

But the peace was starting to wear thin. The first argument had been between Emmett and Irina back in April. They had, without knowing it, been stalking the same bear for hours when they nearly collided. Emmett laughed and offered to fight her for it, which didn't go over so well. The incident was smoothed over, but it was a like a switch had been flipped; tempers began running shorter and, more seriously, the supply of big game was shrinking. The Denalis had always gone far afield to hunt, preferring not to disturb the balance of wildlife around their home, and we respected that. But there were only so many hunting ranges within driving or running distance, if you didn't want to make a weekend of it.

I felt the light shift and opened my eyes, watching dully as each star winked out and the eastern horizon began to glow. Maybe another hour. Tanya hadn't been so careful with her thoughts these past couple of weeks, but at least she generally behaved herself when it was daylight. I took my time brushing the accumulated snow off my clothes and out of my hair, trying to decide if I felt like hunting before returning home. But it would take me a good three hours, and I decided it wasn't worth the concerned look and thoughts Esme would no doubt be giving me. Besides, I had promised I would help her put up the gutters on the new addition this morning.

I was pleasantly surprised not to hear Tanya's mind when I got back to the lodge.

"Where's Tanya?" I asked Esme as we started our work on the gutters.

"She took a trip down to Anchorage for the weekend. I think she's having a rendezvous with that young man she's been emailing with."

I pushed a nail into place with my fingertip, eyeing the rest of the gutter and calculating how many more I might need. "Thank _God_."

Esme's warm chuckle brought a weary smile to my face. "She hasn't been too difficult, has she? You had said she was being considerate."

"That was two months ago," I said drily, jamming another nail into place. "She's _considered_ quite a lot since then."

Esme huffed out a maternal sigh. "I'll speak to her again."

"Don't bother, please." I waited, sure that she would protest and fuss over me, but she fell silent instead, picturing Carlisle at work. I eyed her with suspicion, moving on to the next gutter. Esme was less obvious than she had been with Rosalie back in the day, but the thoughts were there: she wanted me settled, and she felt I could do far worse than Tanya.

I had to admit, Tanya really was being more considerate this time, even now. She seemed lonelier than in previous years, and it gave her fantasies a softer edge. They were often as benign as holding hands and chatting leisurely with me as we walked through the streets of some city or other, or hunting together, or just curling up together to watch the stars. The more scandalous daydreams were sprinkled in often enough that I wasn't too impressed with the change, but I truly appreciated her effort. I wished the best for her, just as Esme wished the best for me.

She didn't need to bother. I was well aware that I was "wasting" my chance to be with one of the only three unattached golden-eyed female vampires known to exist. But I simply wasn't interested, and she knew it. _Tanya_ knew it. It was flattering, I supposed, to have a famous succubus baiting me for nigh on a century now, but that had nothing to do with the kind of love story I would have preferred. I knew the odds of that story ever unfolding were slim to none, and I had decided long ago that it wold be best for everyone if it never did. But at least I could honor it—and the invisible girl who didn't exist—by never settling for less. I had my family, and despite the days when my role as seventh wheel was painfully tangible, that was more than enough.

.

.

.

**One week later**

"Are you going to move sometime in this _century_?!" Emmett grumbled.

"Sshh." Jasper frowned down at the chessboards, rearranging his plan of attack yet again. _He's got something up his sleeve. He wouldn't be so impatient if that rook didn't have some secret mission... maybe an ambush on that corner board..._ He crawled around the game on his hands and knees, examining things from another perspective.

Alice and I glanced at each other from our respective ends of the couch, silently exchanging our guesses as to who would win in the end. She'd been seeing Emmett's smug victory for the past hour, but it was fuzzy and getting fuzzier. _It doesn't matter_ , she thought sulkily. _I'm going to go gray before they're done. Jazz PROMISED me we could go—_

I lost interest in her shopping plans for the weekend, focusing on the game. This was the latest incarnation of my brothers' experimental versions of chess, modified for the vampire mind. Nine interlocking boards made up one big square field of battle. Only the four corner boards started off with complete sets of pieces, though the roster grew more complex as the game went on and the armies spread out and some pieces took on extra abilities. It made for some intriguing strategies. Not that _I_ was allowed to play.

_Here we go,_ Alice thought suddenly, letting out a delicate sigh.

I peered over the top of my book again. "What?"

"Alright, that's it," Emmett growled, reaching for the board too fast for Jasper to stop him. He ripped the middle board right out of the game, sending a few pieces flying. I blocked one with my book at the last second, batting it right back into Emmett's face.

"What the hell's the matter with you?!" Jasper spluttered, scrambling on his hands and knees for the lost pieces.

"I wanna try it without the middle board. It's no good; too many possibilities."

"You could have let us finish the game first!"

"We can finish it! Just put the pieces on whatever spaces are nearest to where they were."

Jasper considered this for a moment. "No, they have to go back to their starting position." The argument quickly deteriorated into a squabble about how to salvage the game and how the various pieces' movement across and around the empty space should be governed.

"What's going on in here?" Esme said, carefully picking one of Emmett's knights out of a potted plant that stood next to the staircase.

"Nothing's broken," Emmett announced, looking innocent and spreading his arms wide and knocking over the other plant in the process. He grumbled an oath and crawled over to clean it up, sweeping half the pieces off the remaining boards with his leg. Jasper growled deep in his throat and chucked one of his own bishops at the back of Emmett's head. Alice hummed to herself, looking pleased as punch.

"I wanted to talk to you all about something," Esme began, shooting Emmett a fierce glance as he gathered himself to pounce on Jasper. He sighed heavily and bounced up onto his feet instead, going to stand behind Rosalie's rocking chair. "I thought this would be a good time since the Denalis are all out at the moment. I've been speaking with Tanya..."

I rolled my eyes, finally closing my book. "Esme," I began, but she held up her hand.

_Not about that._ She gave me the usual sad, sympathetic smile before looking around the room at the others. "I don't think this is working out."

"You mean us living here?" Rosalie asked.

"Unfortunately, yes. But I'd also like to hear what we all have to say about it, and we can include Carlisle when he gets home tonight."

Emmett shrugged. "Gotta admit, the hunting's not too great these days."

"I like it here," Alice piped up.

"So do I," Jasper agreed after a long pause. "Especially how far we are from the humans." He looked up at Esme. "But there's a lot of tension in the air. It's not necessarily between our two families, and not much is being said, but it's getting worse."

"That's what Tanya and I were discussing," she said. "It's a little... crowded, especially now that the semester is over. And Edward, it has to be especially difficult for you. For your gift."

Everyone looked back toward me. "It's crowded," I admitted. "But Carlisle is enjoying his work at the clinic, isn't he?"

Esme gave me the sad smile again, retreating to perch on the lowest step. "He did at first. It was a new challenge, and he's enjoyed working in a more casual atmosphere. But it's gotten monotonous pretty quickly, and the days are slow."

"I haven't heard him thinking like that," I said with a frown.

Rosalie snorted from behind me. "And you know everything, naturally."

"What's your problem?" I shot back in irritation, turning around to face her.

_You are!_

I bared my teeth. "Rosalie, I swear, sometimes—"

"Watch it," Emmett warned.

"See what I mean?" Jasper said to the room in general, slumping back against the couch to let Alice play with his hair.

"Nobody's blaming anybody," Esme insisted, hugging her knees. "I just think it's time to move on."

"And Tanya agrees?" Jasper asked.

"She thinks we need a change, one way or the other. Maybe building our own place further out, but within running distance, or we move on. She feels bad about it, but she's noticed tempers getting short too. And Emmett, you're right about the hunting. You know how the Denalis feel about disturbing the balance of wildlife. So unless everyone is willing to switch to caribou from here on out..."

"We're moving," Emmett said flatly.

.

.

.

Late that evening, Carlisle joined the discussion along with the Denalis. Now that the awkward issue of our needing to move was out in the open, the tension had eased. Alice was the only one truly unhappy about the move; she had especially been enjoying Tanya's company, and she and Eleazar and Irina had enjoyed plenty of lively debates about their investments. Ten years ago, she might not have enjoyed living so far from civilization, but internet access was speeding up every day, and the worldwide mall with it.

"Where will you go?" Carmen asked.

"I didn't have anything particular in mind this time," Carlisle said, looking around the room. "Does anyone have a preference?"

"Somewhere with grizzlies," Emmett said.

"Emmett," Alice grumbled, "you take weekend trips all the time. You can easily get grizzlies if we live anywhere in the US."

"I wouldn't mind being closer to Jenks, though," Jasper said, nodding over toward Emmett.

Irina sighed, running her hand through her hair. "You always put yourselves through so much trouble. Why don't you just settle down somewhere?"

Esme ignored the usual debate that went along with that question. "Carlisle, do you want to teach this time or just work?"

Carlisle shrugged. "Either is fine."

"He wants to work," I reported, enjoying Carlisle's look of exasperation. "So we don't need a big university hospital."

There was a long pause as we all considered various destinations. Kate was thinking of suggesting the Swiss Alps, while Emmett was fantasizing about a five-year safari, threading through Africa, India, and most of the Pacific Islands.

"Emmett," I scoffed, shaking my head fondly.

"You're _kidding_ me," Alice grumbled out of nowhere, shooting Rosalie a glare. "It's one of the rainiest places in the northern hemisphere."

We all turned to Rosalie, who folded her arms defensively. "Well, why not?"

I barked out a laugh, finally seeing her plan. "Rosalie wants to go back to the Olympic Peninsula."

Eleazar's brow twisted in confusion. "Wasn't that the place with the werewolves?"

"We've always talked about going back there," Rosalie pointed out.

"As a _joke_ ," I snorted. "Come on, Rosalie, I know you've been thinking about taking us all back to Europe with you ever since you two got back."

"You loved it there too," she insisted. I shrugged in acquiescence.

"We all did," Carlisle said. "But I'm afraid it's out of the question."

"Who says the wolves are even still around?"

"Rosalie," he said, "even if the wolves are gone, they were part of a Native American tribe. They'll have a long memory, even if the truth about our identity hasn't been passed down. It's not worth the risk."

"I wouldn't mind seeing those wolves again," Emmett muttered, cracking his knuckles. _Still owe them a good fight..._

"All the more reason not to move there," I said, stretching out my leg to kick his chair. "Can we talk seriously about this?"

After few snickers around the room, the conversation went on to other possibilities. Rosalie remained rigid in her chair with her arms folded, but even as she mentally raged about no one listening to her, she began to consider some alternatives too. Kate and Jasper got into a side debate about the danger of being near larger cities with the elevated terror alert level, especially considering the elections next year.

I didn't particularly care where we went. It was a shame, though; Rosalie's suggestion, however unrealistic, brought back pleasant memories of our stay in Washington State back in the late '30s. I could smell the sharp tang of the evergreens as if it were yesterday, the scent deepened with the moisture of the rainforest. And the blood of the mountain lions that had fed on elk that had fed on those trees... legendary. My throat ached at the memory. And there had been so _many_ of those mountain lions...

"...think of that, Edward?"

I came out of my ruminations, realizing that Carlisle had been speaking to me over the din of the various conversations going on. I let the phantom taste of mountain lion blood fade away. "Sorry?"

"Esme and I were toying with the idea of returning to our old stomping grounds in Montana. We'd probably have to tear down the old house, but the property is still nice and secluded. What do you think about that?"

"Sounds good to me. Emmett will love being so close to Glacier National Park."

Carlisle watched me carefully. _You're sure...?_ His mind filled with the uncomfortable memory of the day I had left him and Esme back in '27, at that same house in Montana, and my return there four years later... orange eyes and all.

"I said it's fine, Carlisle." I turned around in my chair toward where Alice and Jasper sat scrunched in the nearest corner of Carmen's favorite couch. The matching blues of their shirts, literally cut from the same cloth, made the two of them look like one big blue marshmallow; matching was one of Alice's latest kicks. "What do you think, Alice?"

"Hmm?"

"About Montana."

"Hmm."

She was completely spaced out, flouncing through forests and shopping malls and school hallways in the world of her visions. I snapped my fingers in front of her face. "Alice. What do you think of Montana?"

Her eyes slowly blurred back into focus. "What? Oh... Montana is all right."

I rolled my eyes. "What do you think about _living_ there? In the old house. I mean, a new house on the old property."

"Hmm." She began to drift away again. "No, I don't think we should go to Montana." A little fold of worry appeared between her eyes, though nothing particular was showing up in her visions.

Jasper abruptly broke off his conversation with Kate, looking down at Alice and tightening his hold around her shoulders a little. "Alice? What's wrong?"

Everyone else's talk faded into silence at his question. Alice continued her silent journey, colors and pictures whirling so fast that I couldn't keep up. Jasper began to rub the back of her neck gently; it was his signal to her that he was worried, that she should come out of it when she was ready. After a few moments, she lifted her eyebrows and came back down to earth with record speed. "Well, that's interesting."

"What?" Tanya asked, looking to me for the answer instead. I flipped my hands up in surrender, just as much in the dark as she was. Eleazar pulled forward away the wall to come closer, intrigued by whatever Alice's gift was doing at the moment.

"We're moving," Alice announced with certainty, "to the Olympic Peninsula."

Matching grins broke out on Emmett and Rosalie's faces. "Excellent," Emmett rumbled, wrapping a huge arm around his wife's waist and pulling her close.

"No, we're not," Carlisle protested, looking confused. "We just decided not to. Your visions wouldn't—"

"I know," Alice interrupted, chewing on her thumbnail and looking confused herself. I finally saw it, clear as day: Carlisle's car, with the rest of the caravan close behind, driving right past a sign that announced our destination. The cars were loaded. The vision swirled and skipped ahead to a picture of Alice and Jasper standing on some lookout with Mt. Olympus in the distance, then a picture of Emmett hefting a wooden beam up to Esme as she worked on a house, with the mountain still hovering out in the sky beyond. There was no mistaking it.

"Who decided to go there?" I asked, looking around the room. Nobody answered.

"It's not always as cut and dried as that, is it, Alice?" Eleazar asked with a knowing smile.

"No," she agreed, still looking as confused as the rest of us. "But I still don't see how it'll work. I guess we'll decide that it's okay?"

"The wolves must be gone," Rosalie said with certainty. "How else would we make that decision?"

"Alice, are you sure that's what you see?" Jasper asked her. "You've never even been there."

"I'm sure."

"She's sure," I confirmed, still watching her mind curiously. "Though I still don't understand..."

"What's the problem?" Rosalie asked. "It's obviously safe, and I know we've all wanted to go back there someday, joking or not. Right, Edward?"

"True."

Another silence as everyone looked to Carlisle. "Well," he said after another long moment. "I suppose there wouldn't be any harm in going down to there to scope it out... for werewolf scent, I mean."

"I'll go," Jasper volunteered.

"I'd be flying," Carlisle told him. "I'd like to rule this out quickly, if it's not feasible, so that we can start looking into other options."

Jasper grimaced, so I raised my hand. "I'll go. I'll be able to sweep a bigger area more quickly." Carlisle nodded. The discussion moved on quickly as we all began to discuss the possibilities. Despite Esme's worry about the wolves being a problem, and Carlisle's concern about a couple of other issues, everyone was feeling fairly hopeful about it.

Carlisle and I drove out to the airport early the next morning, wanting to reach the center of the peninsula by midday. If there were werewolves to be found, it was unlikely they'd be prowling around in their animal form in broad daylight.

_I still don't understand how Alice arrived at those visions_ , Carlisle thought to me after we had gotten through the worst of the altitude change.

"I don't either," I admitted. "As far as I could tell, they just started coming to her."

"She must have been thinking about moving there after Rosalie brought it up, and somehow one thing led to another... or was about to, I suppose." Carlisle smiled conspiratorially. "Or she and Rosalie could have cooked the whole thing up. You know how she likes to keep us guessing about her gift."

"One step ahead," I sighed, fiddling with the handle that was supposed to recline my seat. I finally got it to squeak backwards a full two inches. "Remember when airplanes used to be comfortable?"

Carlisle relaxed back into his own seat, closing his eyes. "At least nobody smokes anymore. You could have flown us down yourself, you know..."

I snorted, reaching for the magazines in front of me. "Not if you wanted to get there this week." I flipped through the pages, curious to see what absurdities were for sale this year. Maybe Carlisle and Esme would like a jigsaw puzzle made from the aerial view of Isle Esme. I was sure Emmett would appreciate a talking dartboard or a personalized bocce set made from imported Italian marble. Seriously, who bought these things? What they _really_ needed to invent was a deodorizer that could absorb the combined scent of two hundred sleep-deprived humans crammed into the cabin of an airplane.

_This is nice, isn't it? Just the two of us. Like the old days._

"Not quite like the old days," I said, flourishing the little silver cell phone that would live in my jacket pocket for the remainder of the trip. But he was being serious, so I put it away. "Yes, it's nice. And it's a relief to get away from everyone else's minds. Relatively speaking," I added with a sardonic grin, gesturing toward the other passengers. I dropped my voice. "It was just you and me, at first, when we ran into the werewolves last time, too. I didn't think we'd be doing this again so soon."

"We'll be careful." _I have to admit, I'm glad Alice had those visions. If it's possible, I think this is one destination we can all agree on. There was just something about that place... it felt like home, in a way most of our homes haven't._

"I felt that way, too," I said. "And it wasn't just that it had so many features that made our lives easier. It was... I don't know, more peaceful somehow, being up in the far corner of the American frontier like that. I hope it does work out."

"So do I."

We spent the remainder of the flight in silence, with Carlisle lost in his own thoughts or reading. I wasn't so lucky. I had an especially entertaining hour listening to the lady in front of me trying to decide how to phrase her confession to her parents that she was pregnant. Meanwhile, there was an elderly married couple two rows up who were giving each other the silent treatment, while still having nearly identical conversations with each other inside their own heads. There was a steady stream of numbers floating over the rest of the noise the entire time, courtesy of an accountant who was frantically trying to catch up on some work on his laptop. Clashing songs from at least thirty different sets of headphones scratched mercilessly on my brain, irritating me anew every time a new song began.

I finally found refuge in the mind of a young woman who sat near the back of the plane, dreamily trying out possible chord progressions for a song she was writing. It took a while, but I eventually managed to get the other minds muffled enough to listen along, hypnotized by her mathematical approach to her music. Before I knew it, we were starting the descent into SEA-TAC.

I looked over Carlisle's shoulder out the window, feeling my lips pull to one side in a nostalgic smile as I saw the endless blanket of deep green spreading out beneath us. The peak of Mt. Olympus kept a majestic vigil over the steaming rainforest out in the distance, and beyond that, the sea.

I didn't know why or how Alice's visions had led us here, but seeing the familiar landscape made me feel somehow certain it was going to work out. I felt a faint stirring of hope—hope for what, I wasn't sure. Perhaps that there really was something special about this place... that it wouldn't be just another stop on an eternal series of stops as we continued to wander forever. Somehow, somewhere deep inside me, I had the unmistakeable feeling that I was coming home.


	2. Memory Lane

We had packed light, so there was no need to put ourselves through the unpleasant ritual of standing awkwardly beside the luggage return and enduring the clumsy shoves of humans who lunged for their suitcases like their lives depended on it. I only had a small bag with a change of clothes and a book or two, and that was small enough to carry on. Carlisle had an overnight bag too, as well as his briefcase.

"What's that for?" I asked him, pointing to the briefcase as we made our way over to the car rental counter.

"Oh, I thought you knew. I have an interview at one of the local hospitals."

"When on earth did you schedule that? We only came up with the idea of moving here last night."

He gave his name to the agent and handed over his credit card. "After we made our plans, I began looking through the websites of the hospitals in the area. I found an opening and submitted my resumé electronically. Would you believe I received an email at 3:00 a.m. inviting me for an interview at my earliest convenience?"

"Sounds like they're desperate. Where is it?"

"Forks."

I wrinkled my nose. "That little logging town? Is it even incorporated yet?"

"It's been almost seventy years, Edward," Carlisle said with a smile. "A lot has changed. Yes, it's a city now, population 3,700. Hospital, police department, high school—"

"I am _not_ going to high school!"

He held up his hands in surrender. "I know. There's a little college just down the road, or you all could attend one of the universities in Seattle. All I'm saying is that Forks has grown big enough to support its own hospital. I haven't heard back about the time yet, but I'm hoping they can fit me in this afternoon."

"And what are you planning to wear?" I nudged his nearly-empty duffel bag with my toe.

He blinked. "Do you know, I completely forgot to pack my suit?"

I chuckled, swiping the keys out of the agent's hand before Carlisle had the chance. "Looks like you're going shopping today, too. I'm surprised Alice hasn't... hold on a second..."

I still wasn't used to the odd feeling of carrying a telephone in my pocket, much less a vibrating one. I took it out and flipped it open to find a text message from my shorter sister.

_Tell Carlisle to get a charcoal suit, and I don't care how funny he thinks that plaid tie is, it's not appropriate for an interview. Go with light blue. I THINK he's going to find it up in Port Angeles, but I'm not sure about that yet so I'll get back to you._

"Your orders, sir," I announced, holding up the little screen for him to see.

.

.

.

Esme called Carlisle on his cell phone while we were driving down the 101 to Aberdeen. Our plan was to trace the treaty line from the southern end right up to the northern coast. Then, if everything checked out, Carlisle could go shopping in Port Angeles in time to make it back down to Forks for the interview, which Esme said was at 3:15.

"They sounded _very_ interested in the email," she reported. "I think you'll be offered a job on the spot."

"That was easy," I said after Carlisle hung up. "So, do you think there'll be any sign of the wolves?"

"I haven't smelled anything yet, but we'll see. Hear anything interesting?"

I shook my head. "I can't make sense of anyone's thoughts at this speed."

_You know, it isn't necessary to break the sound barrier EVERY time you get behind a steering wheel..._

"Spoilsport," I grunted, pressing the pedal a little harder just to tease him. The needle on the speedometer quivered in protest, flirting with the 120 mark. "If you didn't want me to have fun you shouldn't have rented a Mercedes S55."

"I'm actually thinking of getting one when I trade in next time," he said. He lowered the window so he could hold his hand out to feel the hurricane wind we were creating. "I wanted to try it out. I couldn't believe they even had it available to rent—Edward, what are you _doing_?"

"Trying it out," I said pleasantly, shoving the pedal hard into the floor. The engine whined in pain, but the needle reached 150 just as I had to slam on the brakes for a curve in the road. I glanced over at Carlisle, who was staring down at the speedometer with wide eyes. He couldn't even _run_ at 150 miles an hour.

_I am buying this car._

I grinned, easing back up past 100. "Better tint the windows. Not that you'll need it around here, hopefully. Here it comes," I added, turning on the wipers just at the deluge began.

We reached Aberdeen a few minutes later. We drove around while we waited for the rain to end, exploring the port and then driving on to Hoquiam, the town we had lived near in the '30s. Things didn't look as different as I had expected; we were able to recognize plenty of buildings from before, and we were pleasantly surprised to see that quite a few of the old family businesses had survived. I wanted to visit the house we had lived in, but Carlisle didn't want to be pressed for time up in Port Angeles, and he wanted to be sure the treaty line was clear before we separated.

The storm ran its course by 1:00, which didn't leave us with much time. We took it as slow as we could up the western portion of the 101 with the windows rolled down. Carlisle took the wheel so that in the spots where the treaty line pulled away from the highway, I could follow the line on foot while he drove on to the next place they joined up again. We traced the line all the way up to Clallam Bay.

Nothing. Not even the faintest whiff of werewolf scent. I got back in the car and we drove on to Port Angeles, which was neutral territory according to the treaty we had forged with Ephraim Black in '36. I paid special attention to the Native American townspeople we passed, listening to their thoughts for any hints that there might be werewolves on the other side of the line. It was hard to tell who was Quileute, since almost everyone thought in English now, but I didn't catch a single thought about vampires or werewolves, not even in the older ones.

"I think it's safe to separate now," Carlisle said, pulling over to the side of the road. "Unless you'd like to help me pick out my interview suit..."

"Not interested," I assured him, getting out. "Besides, you've got Alice in your pocket."

"True."

I started to shut the door but leaned back down instead. Carlisle looked like he was a million miles away. He was remembering our encounter with the werewolves. "Carlisle? What's wrong?"

He was silent for another moment, staring into space and thinking about everything we had learned about the wolves that day—which wasn't much. "I suppose they really _are_ gone," he said sadly.

"Well, isn't that what we wanted?"

"Yes, but it's a shame. For all we know, they were the last to carry those genes. An entire subculture—an entire species, in a sense—has faded and disappeared in a mere handful of generations. I wonder if anyone in the Quileute Nation even remembers their existence."

Several teenage boys were swaggering down the sidewalk toward us, so I got back into the car and shut the door. "There's only one way to know for sure that they're gone. I could go to the reservation while you're at the hospital."

He finally snapped out of it, turning to frown at me. "No, Edward. We will honor the treaty."

"What treaty? Either they're gone, in which case it's a moot point, or I'll be able to learn that there _are_ werewolves hiding behind the line, in which case it's better to know before we move here."

"No." I opened my mouth to protest, but he held up his hand. "We made a promise, and we're going to keep it. And besides, I can't imagine there being werewolves over there without their scent being thick at the line, like before."

"What makes you think they would respect the line either? We made that treaty so we could coexist in peace here on the Peninsula. I don't see why they would have honored it after we left."

Carlisle thought for a moment. "You're right, I suppose. It was their land all along; the treaty was really made to restrict _our_ movements and give them peace of mind, and to ensure breathing room for all of us."

"All the more reason for us not to worry about it. I'll only go today, if you like, to confirm—"

"I said no, Edward. This isn't just about lines on a map. We gave Ephraim our word that we would give his people plenty of space. The treaty was a tool to ensure that promise, and it still is. How do you think he'd like it if you were to go snooping around the reservation, spying on his descendants?"

"I'm spying on them right now," I said belligerently, gesturing back toward the group of boys as they passed.

_You know what I mean._

"Fine," I grumbled. "Far be it from us vampires to upset a corpse."

.

.

.

I ran back down to Hoquiam first, eager to see if our old house was still standing. It was one of the few houses we hadn't held onto after moving away; Carlisle had thought the wolves wouldn't appreciate it, and the money had made a timely donation to the Red Cross back in 1940. The five of us who had lived here before were hoping that, should the move work out, we'd be able to come full circle and reclaim our old home.

The silence was promising as I approached the property from the northwest—no thoughts. But as soon as I caught a glimpse of the house through the thinning trees, I knew it wasn't meant to be. A bright red muscle car was in the driveway, and even from this distance I could smell the heavy stench of full garbage cans. Well, that was out.

I drew closer to inspect the house anyway. We had such good memories of our time here; it was a shame our good luck about the wolves hadn't extended to a conveniently vacant house. I peeked in through a few of the windows, wistfully hoping for some sign that the family might be thinking about moving out—boxes strewn around, pictures taken down from the walls—but their possessions looked comfortably at home. The sunny end of the living room, where my old piano had once stood, was now cluttered with preschool-age toys, a wide-screen plasma TV, and as easel which held a painting in progress. Whoever the artist was, their style was remarkably similar to Esme's. The forest scene was eerily similar to the painting she had done for me as a Christmas gift back in 1950: the vast forest-scape of the Olympics, painted from a birds-eye view looking northward. But then I supposed everyone around here tended to paint a picture like that; how could they resist?

I circled around to the back, pleased to see that the porch I had helped Esme build was still standing. It bore the usual signs of age, but it had been well kept. I climbed up for a quick look into my old bedroom. It was some kind of home office now. I poked around the property some more, looking for other memories, but I didn't find much. The house's facade and the shape of the yard were completely different now, and Rosalie and Emmett's cottage had been torn down many years ago, judging by the rotting wood debris and the trees that had grown up in its place.

At least the forest itself still felt the same. I took off at top speed through the mostly-cleared back half of the property, reveling in the familiar smells and mottled shade when I got into the thick of the woods. The cool humidity of the rainforest made the scents come alive in a way that was completely different from those of the Amazon. I slowed to a walk, reaching out to touch the damp bark of a grumpy old oak that looked familiar. Somewhere around here was that big Sitka Spruce I had always liked to climb... there it was, even taller than before.

I raced up the giant tree hand over hand. The cool dimness of the forest floor erupted into sunlight as I broke through the canopy, balancing precariously among the highest branches. For miles and miles around me, the treetops of the Olympic National Park stretched out like a vast green blanket, broken only by the snowy rocks of Mount Olympus. The ocean glittered out in the west and I smiled to see the familiar coastline of Vancouver Island up north. I closed my eyes and drew a deep breath, tasting a thousand scents all at once.

_Home._

.

.

.

Once Carlisle had accepted the job in Forks, Esme found a house in record time. Less than two weeks after the interview, we parted with our cousins on good terms.

"You'll miss me," Tanya whispered in my ear as I gave her the obligatory goodbye hug.

"I will," I said politely, pulling away. Once I was safe, I gave her a grateful nod; we both knew how hard she had worked to behave herself the past two weeks. As the leader of her coven, she had been genuinely worried about the tension that had arisen between our two families this time. "Thanks, Tanya."

"Visit anytime."

"I will."

We drove in a long caravan as usual, with Alice and Jasper bringing up the rear in the moving trucks. My new car was an Aston Martin V12 Vanquish—not really that helpful for carting possessions around on days like this, but it was a speed demon that could _almost_ pass for a vehicle belonging to a normal human, if you squinted. We got along just fine.

This was the first time we'd all be able to communicate with each other on the drive without having to yell out the windows, thanks to our new cell phones. But no sooner were we out of my mind-reading range of our cousins than my phone ran out of "bars." I wondered if we'd have much luck with reception down in Washington. It had been spotty enough when we drove around the peninsula two weeks ago. And to be honest, I was hoping there'd be no reception out in the forest so that I'd have no reason to carry my phone every time I went out. Solitude with a buzzing phone in your pocket wasn't really solitude at all.

The drive was a simple one, taking us down through the open silence of Yukon Territory and British Columbia. We stopped for a night of hunting in the Rockies, then made it to Forks in one long stretch. We avoided the town, waiting in a parked caravan off the road while Carlisle and Esme went to close with the lawyers and got the house key, and then followed the directions to the house. We missed the driveway at first, it was so hard to find.

"I think it's this one," Carlisle called out his window, and we all turned into a dirt drive that had more potholes than dirt. I winced with each jarring jolt, wondering how my car was taking it underneath. Smoothing out the driveway would be the first task at hand, if Rosalie and I had anything to say about it. Emmett was having a good old time, purposely aiming his Jeep for all the worst potholes.

 _Lunatic_ , Rosalie thought with an indulgent smirk.

Despite the bumpy ride, I was pleased with how long the driveway was; I wouldn't have to deal with the constant annoyance of people's thoughts passing out on the main road like I had with our last two houses. In fact, even with my window shut I could hear the soothing white noise of the Sol Duc river, which was close by. I'd have to thank Esme for that sometime.

The house finally came into view. Six majestic cedars dwarfed the small front lawn, providing not only a breathtaking scene to come home to, but also plenty of shade near the front door—always a plus when dealing with the occasional human visitor. The house itself was an ugly dark blue thing, but nice and big with a wrap-around porch that had potential.

Esme got out and gazed up at her new baby with dreamy eyes, clasping her fingers under her chin and taking a slow tour around the side. "The porch is even better than it looked in the pictures! But isn't that paint _hideous_ , and I was sure there was a fireplace on the eastern end, but I suppose we could... Oh! Carlisle, look!" She dropped her purse in the grass and shimmied up the peeling wooden siding, slowing to a stop up at the third floor to inspect the little bird's nest she had spied on one of the shutters. She was rewarded with the sight of four little fledglings, peeping and pecking each other. "Sparrows, I think," she called down to us.

Carlisle smiled up at her. "It'll be a challenge not to disturb them, but we'll try. Anytime you're ready, darling."

Esme leaped down and landed squarely in Carlisle's arms, bridal style. He unlocked the door and carried her into our new home as per their usual tradition, sharing a lingering kiss as she slid out of his arms.

"All right, break it up," Emmett said, pushing his way inside. "Let's go stake out our room, babe."

"I want that little corner room on the second floor for my closet!" Alice called, close on their heels. I didn't bother; the bachelor always got whatever was left over. I had more important rooms to scope out.

"Here," I announced a few moments later, quite pleased with the shape of the open area near the front door. The acoustics would improve once the carpet was taken out, and I rather liked how the floor was raised; I'd be stepping up onto the stage every time I played. The rest of the downstairs didn't have nearly so much light, but I suppose there wasn't much that could be done about that when we had a forest for a backyard. I went back outside to start unloading.

"Why don't we put C.E.E. over here?" Carlisle asked Esme, finding a homely little office space tucked away behind the stairs.

"That's fine, although let's take out that counter... Edward, have you found a bedroom?"

"Almost," I called down to her, heading upstairs. Rosalie and Emmett had already claimed the spacious bedroom suite that stretched along the front of the house, and Jasper was piling his boxes of books in a little office room around the corner, which meant he and Alice would probably take over the rest of the second floor. I moved on up to the third floor, finding a good-sized bedroom at the opposite end from the master suite directly above Rosalie and Emmett's, which Carlisle and Esme would naturally take. Quite nice, and certainly as quiet as I was going to manage. I dropped my first armful of boxes with a _thud_ and went back out to explore some more.

The house was even bigger inside than it had looked from the yard. Besides my own room and the master suite, there were two more bedrooms on the third floor and another two on the second floor. The dining room downstairs was normal enough, but the kitchen was enormous. Maybe we'd be able to harvest some of that wasted space somehow. There was a basement, too, though it was only half-finished. And the porch wrapped around a full three-fourths of the house, which gave quite a bit of extra space as well. I gave the railing a gentle tug here and there, impressed with its sturdiness. The house itself was over a hundred years old, but this porch must be newer. A new coat of paint, a little hammering to stabilize the posts, and it'd be good as new.

I took the next load of boxes up to my room. The window was painted shut—why on earth did humans do that? I cut through the paint with my fingernail and eased the rusty lock out of place, but then I saw that it was my windowsill that had the bird's nest. It'd be pleasant to watch the babies grow, innocent of the monster who lurked behind their glass wall. I wouldn't be able to use the window as an exit for a while, but the view more than made up for it: this room looked south, offering a breathtaking view of the Olympics in the distance.

I looked out for a moment, scanning the thickness of the trees to see if there was anything nearer that was interesting to look at. I thought I saw a glimmer that winked in and out; the river, perhaps?

I went into the other bedroom on my half of the third floor and wrestled with its window for a minute, finally managing to get it open without shattering the pane. I jumped down and took a quick look around the scanty backyard—the forest practically grew right up to the house—and picked my way through the trees. The glimmer I had seen from my window was the river, all right, roaring and healthy. It was much closer to the house than I had expected. I took a running leap over it.

Esme had shown me the outline of our property on the zoning map earlier this week, but it would be impossible to tell where our forest ended and state forest began. Sufficed to say, we owned the trees stretching nearly a mile and a half into the foothills of the Olympics, barring rights to alter the river in any way without permission. I was surprised to find the remnants of an old trail not far from the river. It hadn't been used in a long time; for most of its length, the only sign was a winding track of evergreens that were significantly shorter than their neighbors. A rusted tin can was the only other evidence that a human had ever passed this way. I wondered if this path led to an abandoned deer stand or something like that.

I explored here and there, finally taking to the treetops so I could follow the "path" more easily. I was finally rewarded with the sight of a big rectangle of wood so regular that it had to be manmade. It was partially obscured by the overgrowth and the rotted branches that had fallen on it in recent years, but it was definitely a building. I swung back down to the forest floor, surprised to see not a deer stand or a spartan hunting shack, but an adorable little stone cottage.

It was like stepping into a fairy tale. I had landed just far enough away to use the little path of flat stones that led the way home to the front door. The decaying, broken roof was a bit of an eyesore, but everything else was perfect... in a crumbling, half-reclaimed-by-nature sort of way. Wild, meandering honeysuckle had completely taken over one wall. Nearly every stone was outlined and softened with moss. The arched door wasn't in very good shape, but it was made of sturdy oak that had easily outlived the roof.

I walked in a wide circle around the whole thing. A stone chimney crowned the southern corner, and there was a little door in the back that opened directly into what probably used to be a garden. Now, it was just a little outline of rotted miniature fencing, completely overrun by natural growth. Only a single climbing rose plant had survived to tell the story of the former inhabitants, clinging to the mossy stones as if to escape the encroaching wilderness. I reached out and gently touched its petals. _Stubborn rose_ , I thought with a smile. It was a good omen; Rosalie and Emmett were going to love it out here. It'd been a while since they'd really _needed_ four walls of their own to knock down as they pleased, but it wasn't every day we found a house that came complete with a fairy tale cottage. I was almost jealous.

I carefully inspected the rest of the exterior before easing the door open; Esme would want to know every detail, though of course she would soon be out here to see it for herself. I stretched my gift back toward the main house, finding her mind abuzz with renovation plans. She might not be able to get to the cottage right away. I grimaced around the tiny living room. The fireplace was in good enough condition, but the wallpaper was an affront to all that was good and holy. Hopefully the smell would get thrown out with it.

The kitchen was little more than a camper's stove and a sink, which was just as well. Two rickety chairs crowded up to a tiny breakfast table that had seen better days. I was far more interested in the old piano which took up the wall across from the beehive fireplace. I didn't expect much, what with the exposure and the humidity it must have suffered over the years, but I still let out a disappointed sigh when the keys refused to be pushed, much less make any sound. I took a peek inside; the strings actually didn't look too bad. I already had the Steinway baby grand anyway, but it would be a shame to send it to a junkyard. Maybe I could find a local piano repair shop who enjoyed restoring hard luck cases.

Just like the main house, the cottage seemed bigger inside than out. I followed a little hallway—it was arched like the front door, as though I had wandered into a tiny castle—and found a generous master suite matched against two smaller rooms. The plumbing didn't work in the slightest; that would give Esme a pleasant challenge.

The whole thing was perfect. Maybe if Rosalie and Emmett spent enough time out here, they would even agree to switch bedrooms with me. I didn't exactly _need_ a full suite, but I wouldn't say no to my own shower and enough room for all my books to come out of their boxes. They were getting the better deal by far; this place was a jewel. And it felt right, somehow; it had been a shame to see the hunting cottage back at our old Hoquiam place fall into disrepair. Having this little find on our new property seemed to make up for it.

I headed back to the main house, wondering who had lived out at the cottage once upon a time, and why. I supposed it might be as old as the house, or even older; there could have been a whole line of occupants. The cottage had its own little story to tell. Perhaps it had been used as a mother-in-law suite once: a whimsical grandmother with plenty of cats and plenty of time to tend her roses. Then a little honeymoon retreat for a blushing couple who had set up house with a second-hand breakfast table, then a brooding pianist who needed solitude to work on his compositions. And now it would house a pair of lovesick vampires who would hopefully leave it in one piece and pass it on to continue the story. The older we all got, the more distanced we felt from stories like these, no matter how picturesque the setting or how vivid an imprint our renovations left behind. We were just stewards like the rest—here for a day, then nothing more than a fading memory.

.

.

.

My wistful romanticism was quickly broken upon my return to the main house. Not only was Rosalie completely offended by my cottage idea, but she was dead set on going to high school here in Forks.

"I am _not_ going to high school!" I informed her through clenched teeth.

"So don't go," she said, flicking her hair over her shoulder. "But I'm going. I've waited over sixty years to come back here, and I want to stay as long as we can. That means starting in high school. You can go to med school or conservatory or whatever you like."

I shook my head. "I'm supposed to be younger than you, remember? I know we've each done our own thing at some of the other locations, but this time we need to keep the cover story straight. This is a small town, and Carlisle's job is smack in the middle of it. We're more visible than usual."

Rosalie scoffed, but looked over to Carlisle and Esme.

"I'm afraid Edward is right," Carlisle said. "This is one of those times where we all need to be on the same page. Whatever you all agree to do, it needs to match up and make sense to the locals."

"High school," Rosalie said, giving Emmett a wide stare. He echoed her vote without a second thought. Traitor! That was it, I was doomed.

"High school," Alice chimed in.

"Come on, Jasper, back me up," I pleaded.

Jasper opened his mouth and then shut it again, looking down at Alice. He shrugged, giving me an apologetic smile. _You'll understand someday._

"Oh, come on!" I growled. "You hate high school as much as I do."

"Doesn't matter," Rosalie said. "Three's a majority."

"There are seven people in this family—"

"Two of whom don't go to school at all, and therefore don't count!"

"I'm sure we can work it out," Esme interrupted firmly, laying a hand on my arm. "Edward, I don't see why you have to go to high school with the others if you don't want to. We could come up with something in the cover story, some reason you need to be homeschooled, or we could say you're doing some special correspondence program..."

"And sit in the house all day? That's even worse!"

"Well, go to college, then. It's a quick commute, even if you go to Seattle, and we'll just have you be older than the others."

I thought about it for a moment. "Maybe."

"But then you'd be too old too fast," Jasper pointed out. "You'd still be stuck at home, just in the second half of our stay versus the first half, or we'll have to leave earlier." _Come on, Edward. If I have to go, you have to go._

"Come on, Edwarrrrrrd," Alice whined. "Rosalie's right. You've both always wanted to come back here, and this gives us all the longest stay. And we haven't done high school in a while, so it'll be more fun if we all do it together." _Besides_ , she added silently with an impish grin, _you've already made up your mind, or at least you're about to._ She showed me the evidence with disappointing clarity: all five of us slouched over one of those octagonal lunch tables, and a big sign distinctly visible out the windows of the cafeteria. _Forks High School: Home of the Spartans._

Unbelievable. Was there no justice in this world? I shot Carlisle a mournful look, but he just shrugged, looking away to hide the bemused twinkle in his eye. He was actually enjoying this.

I drew in a long, deep breath and let it out again. "I'll do it on two conditions. One, I absolutely _will not_ start off as a freshman"—I shot both my sisters a threatening look—"and two, I'm going to need another car. Unlike some people, I actually intend to make an effort to blend in."

"Deal," Rosalie said immediately. Alice jumped up onto Jasper's back with a little shriek of victory. Esme just sighed in relief and went outside for more boxes.

Carlisle held up his hands. "I'm glad you're all in agreement. And Edward, of course you can drive whatever you like..." He cleared his throat, looking at me with the twinkle in his eye again. "...when you're old enough to drive, that is."


	3. Paintball and Potty Passes

FWe each had our specialties. One of Emmett's was to come up with a new game or sport for us to enjoy each time we moved. In a lifestyle that felt increasingly monotonous, it kept things interesting—especially when we found ways to modify human sports and games to "Level Vampire," as Emmett liked to call it.

Of course, there were some games that Alice and I were excluded from no matter what challenging upgrades we invented, and on the flip side, there were some that didn't need to be modified at all to be enjoyed. This was especially true when the only goal of the sport in question was to mercilessly splatter your siblings with paint and laugh at them. It was paintball this time.

It had sounded simple at first: scope out the playing field, divide into teams, sneak around and hide from each other, try to pepper your opponents with as much paint as possible. But it was hard for vampires to really hide from each other, and things got tricky when it came to assigning the teams. Emmett's size made him a liability for once, and there were the usual accusations that Alice and I had an unfair advantage due to our gifts.

"What about Jasper?" I said. "When anyone gets within a two-hundred-foot radius, he'll be able to pinpoint their location with his eyes closed."

"Only their direction," Jasper protested, "not their distance. And you know my gift can't keep up with the speed of vampire movement, so it's a moot point anyway."

"Not if the person is holding still to hide," Rosalie said.

"In any case, my gift doesn't matter because as I've stated six times now, I am _not_ getting paint in my hair or on my clothes. I'll referee." Alice folded her arms tight across her belly, standing her ground against our enormous brother.

"Hey, you're the one that made that rule about no getting sniffy over family games and no permanent referees!"

"It's _paint,_ Emmett!"

Carlisle held up his hands for quiet; the characteristic gesture was comically marred by the paintball gun dangling from his thumb. "We'll just have to play it out and see how different combinations work, like we always do. Emmett, why don't you assign the first teams and we'll go from there."

After some hemming and hawing, Emmett decided that his team would include Rosalie, Alice, and Esme. Carlisle, Jasper and I would serve as the "home" team, getting a generous twenty seconds to hide before the others were allowed onto the playing field. We decided to go with a timed game, at least in our first attempt, versus elimination. Rosalie and I argued briefly over whether each team's paint damage should be counted in square inches or percent of total body surface area, and then we were ready to go. Emmett's team vacated to a reasonable distance while the rest of us stood waiting.

"Start!" Emmett bellowed, and we dispersed to hide. We had spent the morning traipsing around the forest together, finding little streams and rock formations and other landmarks that would serve as boundary lines for the twelve square miles that made up the playing field. It was ironically similar to the bizarre evening we had spent with the werewolves back in '36, just a few miles west of where we were right now. Once Carlisle had managed to talk us all down from killing one another and the treaty had been hammered out, we had all walked the length of the peninsula together, carefully tracing a jagged line from north to south that we still respected as impassable. And here we were again.

I wasn't the only one that had an indescribable feeling of coming home now that we had returned to the Olympics. Rosalie and Emmett had spent nearly every night out either exploring the forest or returning to old dives in Seattle, and Carlisle had been eagerly reading up on local history since landing his job at the hospital in Forks. Even Alice and Jasper, who had never been here before, were enjoying their new home in the Pacific Northwest. And for all our bickering, we truly appreciated Emmett's little games. Even when moving to a place we loved, we needed his boisterous fun to help us relax in each of our new homes. The first few weeks were always the most interesting, but they could also be trying, and moments like this helped keep the edge off.

I tore through the trees, looking up and down for a good spot. The trick would be to mask my scent as much as possible... I finally settled on a brambly thicket that had grown around the torn-up roots of a massive oak that had fallen years ago. There was a little open space just within the grasp of the finger-like roots, small enough to be easily missed and just large enough to easily escape when the time came. The carpet of pine needles looked thick enough that I should be able to bury myself without getting too filthy, and the wind wasn't strong down here.

Five seconds left: just enough time to lay a false trail. I jogged out westward for a few hundred feet, touching as many trees as I could in passing. Then I took to the lower branches and returned to the thicket along the same route, taking the last fifty feet in one jump so the trail wouldn't lead right to the my hiding spot. I wriggled down into the brush, flinging a thick layer of pine needles over myself.

"All right, losers!" Emmett boomed out, finishing with a villainous laugh as he and the others ran back into the game area.

I cut off my breathing. They tramped through the woods for a while, sniffing out our garbled scents and listening for clues. The others had hidden too far away for me to locate via my gift, at least not without the cheat of stretching out to my full capacity, which I had sworn up and down not to do. Finally Emmett was the only one left I could hear. He quietly took to the trees, taking care not to disturb more wildlife than was necessary as he tracked me. It was only a matter of time; an expert tracker even in his human years, he was mapping out the forest floor in his mind, listening for an area that had a bubble of silence, indicating the familiar absence of insect activity—a dead giveaway that a vampire was lurking nearby. I slowly shifted the barrel of my paintball gun up through the clumps of pine needles around my face, determined to get him on approach if I could. As long as he was looking in the right direction, I'd be able to use his own visual field as a periscope.

He was sorting out the false trail now. Just a few more feet...

"Gotcha!" I called out, popping out of the thicket and squeezing the trigger. But Emmett dodged the paintball easily, even after he had to turn around in surprise. We ran a zig-zag pattern opposite each other and exchanged fire at point-blank range a couple of times, but it was a big letdown; the paintballs traveled too slowly through the air. We could have stepped out of the way with our eyes closed.

"Damn it," Emmett growled, shaking his gun as if it would somehow encourage the design to exponentially improve. "Time out, family meeting!" he bellowed over his shoulder, and the others soon arrived. Everyone's clothes were as paint-free as ours.

"It's no good," I told them. "Too slow."

"Surely if we're close enough?" Esme asked.

Emmett whipped his gun up to fire right between my eyes from five feet away. I yawned, stepped around the path of the paintball as it floated toward me, and plucked it out of the air to return it to my sullen brother. He heaved a sigh, staring down at the bright purple sphere in his palm.

"I gotta work on this," he announced. "We'll try again." He began to studiously dismantle his gun. He was already dreaming up modifications; any chance to play mad scientist.

"I vote we move on to hang gliding," Alice said with a sniff. _Couples hang gliding_ , she thought, raising her eyebrows and sharing a naughty look with Jasper.

"Well, good luck," Carlisle told Emmett, handing over his weapon to Esme. "I need to clean up for work."

We all dispersed to enjoy our last few hours of freedom however we liked; school began in the morning, at least for Alice, Emmett, and me. Rosalie and Jasper would be playing the role of foster twins as they sometimes did, so they would get another week and a half before they "arrived." We had found, through trial and error, that there were ways to minimize the shock our human peers would inevitably feel when five monsters of unearthly beauty invaded their school, and those measures were especially important to take in these small-town situations. It also softened the blow to start school on the same day as everyone else. Even if we were the only new students moving into the district this school year, our human classmates would be especially self-focused on their first few days, obsessively wondering what everyone else thought of _them_. The gossip was inevitable, but at least the stir we caused would be only part of the social upheaval of the first week of school.

I spent the night out at the fairy tale cottage, as I had come to think of it. Since Rosalie and Emmett weren't interested, I had temporarily staked my claim to the mossy stone walls and the convenient workspace inside. My first project here in our new home would be to restore the hard-luck piano or go down trying. I'd had no luck finding a local expert in restoring pianos, weather-damaged or otherwise, so it was time to pick up a new hobby. I ordered all the books I could find on the subject, three of which had arrived this morning. Jasper had pointed out that I might find tutorials and even videos online with which to train myself, but I preferred to learn the old-fashioned way.

After I had studied every word and compiled a mental list of the tools I would need to order, I grew restless waiting out the rest of the night. Rosalie and Emmett had commandeered the entire house as their personal honeymoon suite—which they wouldn't have _needed_ to do if they had just taken the cottage that was handed to them on a silver platter—and it was too rainy to enjoy the forest. I decided it was as good a time as any to liberate the cottage from the wallpaper some sadist had decided to glue onto every square inch of interior wall.

.

.

.

"Alice!' Esme called for the third time, finally blaring the horn. "We're supposed to get there fifteen minutes early!"

"Coming, coming!" Alice yelled from inside the house. She finally streaked out the front door in a flash of color, rocking the whole car sideways when she crash-landed into my side in the back seat of our new Mercedes. Carlisle had indeed gotten an S55, a slick black panther of a car that purred nicely under the hood at respectable speeds. Forks Hospital's newest physician was just coming home, passing us on the highway just as we were getting into town. He had taken Rosalie's BMW to work last night so that Esme could drive us to our first day without attracting too much attention. He waved as he zoomed past.

Esme enjoyed taking us to school whenever she got the chance. She was every inch the doting mother, fiercely proud of her monster ducklings no matter what we did. It wasn't often that she got to play out the fullness of the role that meant so much to her, however imaginary it was. She began humming as she pulled into the high school parking lot, dancing her fingers along the steering wheel as she patiently waited her turn in the long line of minivans.

I took the chance to study the school grounds. The first thing that caught my eye was the way the forest encroached on school grounds, or, inversely, the apologetically tight space the school had taken from the towering evergreens that had given the town its livelihood in the first place. The trees lined the parking lot, jutting inward along the back as if trying to take the land back. This was a definite plus; it would provide a neat escape if any of us should find the temptation too strong at any moment. But the absence of a single, large building was a strong demerit—not at all ideal for vampires, having to dodge the sunlight between each class. But then sunlight here on the Olympic peninsula was about as mythical as we were, so I supposed it was an even break.

It reminded me of the school back in Hoquiam, a collection of ramshackle trailers and houses all built in different decades. No doubt the local humans considered the slow expansion over time to be a matter of history. From our perspective, the town seemed to have grown up overnight. I had driven through the little logging town of Forks back in the late thirties, if it could even have been called a town back then. Whatever it was, it had taken less than a minute to drive through. I felt a peculiar sense of pride to see it flourishing, rust or not.

"No problems so far," Alice reported, blindly fumbling with her seat belt, too busy with her visions to see what was right in front of her. Esme smiled up at her in the rear-view mirror, marveling for the thousandth time not just at Alice's powerful gift, but at her incredible ability to enjoy our human charade like this at all. To face the staleness of yet another "first day" with anything resembling anticipation. I reached across and released her seat belt for her.

Poor Esme; it would mean so much for her to kiss us all goodbye and greet us this afternoon with freshly baked cookies, ready to hear about our exciting first day at a new school. As it was, Alice was the only one who could muster a perky farewell as we climbed out of the car, trudging at human speed toward the door to the main building along with the rest of the herd. I finally did the right thing and turned on my heel, waving goodbye. It earned me a friendly beep of the horn and a blown kiss; my good deed for the day. Time to sink into the near-somnolent slouch expected of a high school sophomore, too young to be interesting but too old to appear impressed. I _wished_ I could sleep through the next seven hours.

Our presence attracted immediate attention, and Alice wasn't helping. She was radiating excitement, practically bouncing along on tiptoe as we entered the school. Her high-pitched thoughts were temporarily drowned out by the crowd of minds and sounds and smells pressing in around us. Each school had its own unique blend of sensory stimuli. It would take time to adjust, as it always did.

"This one smells like one of those loaner gym uniforms," Emmett said. I nodded in grimacing agreement.

"That'll help Jasper," Alice said cheerfully. "Come on, let's get our schedules!" She darted out of sight, slipping through the cracks between the loitering students.

"No rush," Emmett chuckled. He was already laughing it up behind that dumb-jock mask of his. He actually _enjoyed_ the gaping attention of the adolescent children lining the halls, though not for the same reasons that Rosalie would when she started next week. He just thought it was hilarious. He was imagining himself as he would appear at his true human age, a sprightly ninety-year-old buck sauntering by his admirers on wobbly arthritic knees. He winked at one of the wide-eyed girls and cracked his neck as we passed by. "Hey," he grunted over his shoulder in her general direction. She nearly fainted.

"Cut it out," I muttered under my breath.

"Jealous?" he teased.

"Grateful," I corrected, "that you're standing next to me. But could you at least _attempt_ to keep a low profile? I don't want to move anytime soon."

_Enjoy the anonymity while you can, kid. Once Rose and I hook up it'll be up to you to break all the hearts._

I ignored him, sweeping the tangle of thoughts for any warning signs. Only a few students were focused on us. Most were fussing over their own appearance, the upperclassmen reconnecting with their friends and the freshman bumping into each other as they tried to find their homerooms. Nothing stood out; no one was alarmed by our presence, at least not consciously, and no one was thinking about mythical creatures. The crowd parted for our passage as it usually did, with no one aware that they were actually backing away. Some deeply buried instinct told them to keep their distance . . . not that it would save their lives if the worst should happen. I took a discreet, deeper glance into Emmett's mind, swallowing the extra twinge it caused in my throat. He was feeling the strain of the crowd of beating hearts crammed into an enclosed space, but the gym uniform smell really did help.

We caught up to Alice in the office, endured the stammering mental flattery of one Mrs. Cope, and got our schedules and maps of the school, which we dropped in the waiting recycle bin on our way out. Alice and I were both starting as sophomores, so our schedules matched up fairly well. We exited out the back door. Emmett's thirst eased in the open air. Maybe the different buildings would turn out to be a plus, after all.

Emmett went off to English in the main building, Alice and I to Chemistry in Building 4. We slid into the two seats furthest back. One of us did this to avoid attention, and the other one did it to maximize her studies in high school fashion over the course of the next hour.

_... had known that sticking rhinestones all over my butt was the thing to do, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble... Ooh, that fabric in hunter green is absolutely delicious, and what are those things in her hair anyway?_

"Butterfly clips," I said with a sigh, unable to avoid my front-row seat to the girl's anxious mental monologue over her hair. Alice's eyebrows raised into two delicate arches as she tried to decide whether she was offended by said butterfly clips or whether she might like to try them.

She was just breaking into the usual lament over how her short hair limited her options when the teacher came in and began to drone about lab safety, how to use the eyewash station, his homework policy, etc. I'd tuned out these introductions more times than I could count, but this one seemed to rankle at my dignity more than was customary. A brief ten months ago I had been an Ivy League med student, and yet here I was: a high school sophomore who was unable to drive himself to school or even use the restroom without permission. Not that I would ever need to use the restroom, but that was beside the point. It was so... degrading.

The rest of the morning stretched on and on, one introductory lecture after another. In each class, the enforced stillness allowed the humans to tire of their obsessive self-focus and begin taking longer peeks at their classmates. Without my massive brother at my side to attract most of the attention, I was the target of most of these stolen glances and the star attraction of curious thoughts. New students weren't at all unheard of, it seemed; there was a healthy amount of turnover in the local population compared to some of the other small towns we had haunted in years past. But there was nothing I could do to shield myself from the simultaneous dread and fascination that my appearance generated beyond the usual interest in a new face. I let the constant barrage of thoughts wash over me, paying only enough attention to check for anything dangerous. It would take time for my gift to acclimate to the unique cacophony of this particular blend of voices—maybe five, six hundred in all. It'd been a while since we last attended high school; I had conveniently forgotten what it was like. The unpleasantness of volatile hormones aside, adolescent humans had an irritating tendency to shout inside their minds at the most unpredictable moments.

_Oh. My. GOD. Just LOOK at him!_

Yes, exactly like that, I thought irascibly as I rejoined my siblings in the cafeteria at noon. I entertained a moment's feeble hope that the high-pitched mental squealing was directed at Emmett, but fate was feeling especially vindictive today. The girl was not only staring right at me, but she was already making a beeline for where I stood in line behind Alice.

 _Fangirl at three o'clock_ , Alice warned with a pitying grimace. _This one's going to be tough to shake loose. Enjoy!_

"Thanks so much," I growled back at her. If she were a _loyal_ sister, she'd invent some emergency to get me out of this. I felt a defiant urge to snatch her hand up in mine and kiss her right in front of the whole school. Anything to deflect the attack. Cover story be damned; Jasper could be the single one this time. I gritted my teeth, resigning myself to the inevitable.

"Oh, hiiiiii," the girl whined as her brand-new shoes squealed to a stop beside me: a last-minute decision to pretend she hadn't just picked me out of the crowd. Her curly mop of black hair flounced forward with the suddenness of her halt and she began raking it backwards in a doomed attempt to tuck it behind her ears. Her perfume was _hideous_. I stared ahead, flatly ignoring her.

 _WhatToSay, WhatToSay!?_ "Sooooo, um, I haven't seen you before so I guess you're new around here?" _OhMyGodWillYouRunAwayWithMe—_ "My name is Jessica—oh hiiiiiii!"

Alice had finally taken pity on me, turning to greet the girl in my stead. "Hiiii, I'm Alice Cullen," she chirped, perfectly imitating Jessica's shrill greeting. The girl blinked and stepped back an inch or two, exhibiting the usual breath-hitching response when one of us addressed our would-be prey with direct eye contact. No matter how we tried, we couldn't quite get it right. Carlisle was the best at it; Alice was decidedly the worst at it. Good; maybe the girl would keep backing up until she backed right out the door to the hallway.

"We just moved here," Alice went on before the girl could inhale enough air to start the squealing again. "Carlisle—he's our adopted dad—just started at the hospital, he's a doctor. Edward, say hi."

"Hi," I intoned, intently studying the menu on the dry-erase board hovering above the cafeteria ladies' heads. Traitor. At least she'd deflected Jessica's interest somewhat by mentioning the adoption.

"Oh, you guys are adopted? I mean, yeah, that makes sense, you don't really look alike, I mean at first I thought so but I guess your hair is totally different? One of my cousins is adopted, I mean he was already sort of a second cousin but anyway, oh right, I heard about the new doctor..." she paused for a gasping breath, examining Alice's appearance again now that wealth had entered the picture. Her appraisal wasn't very flattering.

 _Be polite_ , Alice scolded. _It's time to start the rumor mill and you want to give a good impression._

"No, I really don't," I said to the dry erase board. Alice was right, of course: here in the social free-for-all of the lunch hour, the speculation about us was starting to really warm up. Jessica might as well be the one to spread the gossip. I let Alice do the talking. No, we weren't related. There was another one, Emmett, who'd probably be along in a moment. We'd recently moved here from Alaska. No, neither of us had ever been on a dogsled. Yes, Carlisle and Esme were fairly young to be adoptive parents of teenagers. Esme had had me since I was eight and my mother had died, who was her cousin once removed and she had always been sort of an aunt to me even back in her college years. We wouldn't yet introduce the shocking news of the soon-to-arrive Hale twins; it was better to let the humans digest the first round for a while. No, we didn't need a tour of the school. Yes, we were enjoying our new home so far. Jessica was getting bolder with her rapid-fire questions, just about to start dropping hints about her availability when Emmett finally caught up to us in line.

"Here's Emmett," I announced cheerfully, turning to face my attacker for the first time. "Em, this is Jessica Stanley."

He grunted in her direction, but she had eyes only for me and for the credit cards peeking out of my wallet when I pulled out some cash to pay for our lunches. I made the profound error of paying for her lunch since she was sandwiched between the three of us. It was a mistake I'd no doubt be paying for over the next several weeks, I realized with a wince. She instantly began gushing gratitude and demanded to return the favor by inviting us to sit with her and her little friends.

"Thanks, but your table is already crowded," I said, steering Alice toward the solitude of the empty tables along the far wall.

 _What do you think you're doing?_ Alice thought, pushing back past me to sit with Jessica and the others. _Aren't you always the one pushing us to blend in for at least the first week?_

"Suit yourself," I said, motioning with an impatient flourish for her to go on. Emmett followed me to the outcast table. We listened for a moment to the others as they introduce themselves to Alice: Mike, Eric, Angela, Ashley, Ben. Jessica leaned backwards in her chair to introduce a few more of her acquaintances at the next table: Lauren, Tyler, Kayleigh, Whitney, and so on. She was speaking louder than necessary so that despite my exile, I wouldn't mistake her intent to include me. I scooted my chair around to turn my back to her.

 _Awww, he must be so nervous_ , she thought in aching tones. _Living out in the middle of nowhere like that. I bet he's never been around so many kids before. Probably doesn't even know what to say to a girl... this is your lucky day, Edward Cullen, because I'm the listening type..._ _break you right out of your shell, that gorgeous, ice-cold, brooding shell of yours..._ She began to fan herself with her napkin.

"How's your day going?" I asked Emmett.

He began mincing the chicken whatever-it-was with a plastic fork. "Great," he grumbled. "Fantastic. Just peachy. Did you know they have mandatory P.E. _all four years_ at this school? And the football coach is also the gym teacher, so he's already dropping hints. C'mon, let's fake-eat something."

We spent the rest of the lunch hour dissecting our food and pretending to consume the occasional morsel. We rarely had to take a real bite these days; we were professionals when it came to the eating charade. No, the real trouble was the irritating monologue coming from Jessica's mind. She was losing interest in Alice's not-quite-right human perkiness and the fantasies were already beginning. They were benign enough, at least for now. Miss Stanley was a strategist by nature, and Stage One of her mission was clear: get that painfully adorable Edward Cullen to notice meeeeee.

So it was with ear-splitting delight that she discovered that we shared the next class, World History. What had I done to deserve this? Recently, anyway? I commandeered the most isolated desk I could find. Surely she was the social butterfly sort, and wouldn't like being off in a corner. But no, she was more than happy to sprawl her brightly-colored belongings all over the nearest desk. She plunked herself down in the seat, crossing her bared legs in my direction with a welcoming ankle twirl for a finale. I angled myself away from her expectant gaze.

 _Wow, he really is shy._ I listened with renewed hope as she fiddled with the charm on her necklace and reconsidered her mission. She glanced around at the athletic competition in the room: healthy, odiferous specimens all, many of whom should have put me to shame at first glance. _He's just so pitiful and sweet. He needs me_ , she decided, and let out a languorous sigh that turned every head in the room but mine.

 _Do your worst_ , I thought with a mental chuckle. After several months of living with the world's most famous succubus, it was doubtful that her girlish imagination could dish out anything I'd find too difficult to manage. She'd lose interest eventually. They always did.

.

.

.

"How was your first day?" Esme called even before we trudged through the front door. Instead of the quintessential cookies and milk, she had set the dining room table with lopsided piles of brochures and business cards.

"The usual," I sighed, shrugging out of my jacket.

"Edward has an admirer," Alice reported cheerfully. Esme's eyebrows rose in concerned amusement.

"What's all this?" I asked her, plucking a brochure off the table. _Ed's Tree Service._

Esme's smile grew secretive. "Oh... just a little project." Her mind instantly darted away from trees services and began listing all the colors of paint chips she had looked at earlier this afternoon. "Where's Emmett?"

"Forest," I said, waving a hand out toward the trees in general. He and Rosalie needed to recuperate from their seven hours apart; the withdrawal had already begun. Jasper was aching to reunite with Alice, too, but he was content to continue reading in his study until she came up to greet him. I wondered idly if they'd be playing First Sight when Jasper and Rosalie started school.

It was a little prank we liked to play on our fellow students sometimes. Since Rosalie and Jasper would just be joining the family according to the cover story, it was also the time when the rest of us supposedly met them. It only made sense that the two couples wouldn't pair off immediately, seeing as how they were still getting to know each other. Rosalie and Emmett usually weren't able to stretch it out more than a day or two, but Alice and Jasper liked to take it slow sometimes. It helped minimize the more damaging type of gossip, but it also kept things interesting without creating a spectacle. And we needed interesting.

Alice and Emmett could entertain themselves for now, though. I'd do my best, as always, to keep my boredom to myself, especially during these first few days without Jasper. Without having his willpower to worry over, Alice was especially free to enjoy her fantasy that she was a normal high school student making friends. It'd be over soon enough. The children at Jessica's lunch table would breathe more easily once Alice joined us at the outcast table, and Jasper really did need to be watched. Emmett and Rosalie would be able to resume their twitterpated high school romance, and I would dutifully take my place as the brooding bachelor. Someone needed to keep an ear out for trouble, after all, so it might as well be the telepath.

It was a script we had acted out time after time. We switched it up whenever the roles began to get too dull. High school grew more intolerable with each repetition, so I had no doubt that it'd be college the next time around; Carlisle and Esme might even join us. For now, it was the same old show. Reruns were tolerable in a campy way at the best of times, but it was the company that made them worthwhile. We had each other, and that made all the difference in the world.


	4. First Sight

The hunting on the peninsula was such a disappointment this time around. When we had lived down in Hoquiam back in the late '30s, the Olympics had been _teeming_ with elk—Carlisle's favorite—and as a result, the larger predators had abounded as well. Even now, nearly seventy years later, my throat still burned with appreciation whenever I recalled the unique flavor of mountain lions who had fed on those elk, who in turn had fed almost exclusively on local evergreens. Exquisite.

But I wasn't hunting for mountain lions today; I was hunting for solitude. In each location, we all had our favorite spots, our private retreats, both as couples and as individuals. As the family bachelor _and_ the family telepath, I had need of such a refuge even more than the others. The cottage was essentially mine now, but the forest was so thick there, and it was just a little too close to home. Emmett and Rosalie didn't always honeymoon in the house, after all. I needed something much farther out.

I explored on foot for a while, picking through the trees, then finally took to the higher branches. I thought I had seen a tiny open space somewhere around here when I had looked down from Mt. Olympus last week...

Sunlight ahead. I dropped back down to the ground and pushed forward eagerly. The trees thinned suddenly, and after a couple of steps through a wall of generous ferns, I found myself standing in a bracken-littered circle that opened wide to the sun. The stump of an enormous cedar stood in the exact center of the opening. The remnants of its trunk and most of the dead branches lying around were blackened and rotted, sticking up at odd angles from the thick, healthy brush that had grown up in the space once darkened by the cedar's thick shadow.

I doubted a fire, controlled or otherwise, could have carved such an oddly circular shape. Perhaps a lightning strike, a year or two ago, had chosen this spot by striking the cedar. I felt the corner of my mouth lift up in irony as my fancy took hold of the theory. Yes, Fate had known all along that a melodramatic teenage vampire would one day be in need of such a place, and she had shot down her bolt to prepare the way. Well, a provision like that was not to be wasted.

I spent the rest of the afternoon clearing out the dead branches, flinging them over my shoulder to scatter them around the nearby forest. I wrestled the trunk out of the ground by hand—not an easy task, even for a vampire—and, after giving it some thought, I decided to clear out the bracken and brush as well. I liked the untouched wildness of the rain forest, but this time I thought I'd keep going and create a little meadow. I even uprooted the younger trees that had infringed on the clearing in the years since the cedar had died, reshaping my little haven into a truer circle. Once the ground was clean, I sat back on my heels and looked around again, dreaming up what else I would like to do with it.

"Can I plant grass seed now?" I asked Esme when I got back to the house. "Or do I have to wait for spring?"

She nodded absently, still turning the pages of a new architecture textbook. "I was planning to give the lawn a booster sometime this weekend."

"Do you already have the seed? It's for another project."

She didn't, so once the clouds rolled in for the day, we went together to a local nursery. I wanted this to be _my_ project, but I'd never paid much attention to gardening details before. And reminding Esme of my need for solitude was just the sort of thing that got her worrying about my tragic bachelorhood. But I needn't have worried. Her mind was sharply focused on one of Jasper's latest inventions—a special phone, a central hub that rang every time a human thought they were calling one of our references. _The_ Phone, as we had fondly dubbed this latest venture, would be parked in Jasper's study from now on, connected to the master laptop from which he wrote and ran his growing collection of programs designed to constantly sweep the internet and various databases. Facial recognition technology, while still in its infancy, would soon add to the list of dangers, and Jasper would have to stay on the cutting edge just to keep up. Risk management was getting to be a full-time job in the digital age.

"Esme," I said with fond suspicion, "what are you trying to hide?"

She just flashed me a smile and launched into a speech about zoysia plugs.

Working on the meadow would have to wait; tomorrow was Monday and I still needed to empty out my room. I had just gotten everything out of the boxes last week when Esme ordered me to pack it back up. Whatever this secret plan was, Jasper was in on it too—he'd found excuse after excuse to be out of the house this weekend.

This Thursday would be his and Rosalie's first day of school. Alice, Emmett, and I had made sure to be overheard at school this past week as we discussed the mysterious foster twins that would soon be coming to live with us. Emmett _thought_ he vaguely remembered meeting Rosalie and Jasper once back when the three of them were eight years old, as the cover story went, and Alice and I hadn't even been adopted yet at that point, so we had no memories of ever meeting the Hales before. All we knew was that Esme and Mrs. Hale had been good friends, so when Esme found out about her friend's death last year and learned that Rosalie and Jasper had never gone to live with any relatives, she and Carlisle had gladly offered to take them in. The arrangements had taken several months since Carlisle and Esme had known they were about to move down to the lower forty-eight, but the day was finally here.

Esme would make sure that the counselor at Forks High found out that Rosalie and Jasper had already been in the foster system for a while by this point, had already been through counseling, etc. It was always a balancing act with these things; having the family arrive in pieces took some of the shock out of our arrival, and having the lovebirds "meet" each other in front of everyone helped cut down on the more damaging rumors. But these arrangements also required some kind of traumatic event to explain the new arrivals, making it necessary to muddy the waters so school counselors and social workers didn't get too interested. Alice had been plagued by well-intentioned worries over eating disorders in recent years, and _no_ one thought it was a good idea for Jasper or Emmett to be cooped up in a tiny room with a human in weekly counseling sessions.

So whatever Esme's construction project was, it was well-timed. Let the humans see us scrambling to prepare for a sudden addition to the family; Rosalie and Jasper would just have to keep out of sight a few more days. But Esme was apparently planning to take things a little further this time.

"I'm hiring three local companies to do the job," she told us that night. "I want the finished product to be a surprise, and anyway, they'll be expecting us to stay away until this particular job is done. So we're going to be staying in a hotel the next three nights."

"What about Rosalie and me?" Jasper asked with a frown. Apparently he hadn't been as privy to the secret as I had thought. "We can't be seen in public yet."

"I'm afraid not," Esme said. It'll just be Alice and me and one room, Carlisle, Emmett, and Edward in the other. Edward can make sure all the nearby humans are asleep before you all begin sneaking in and out."

"I'm not sure how comfortable I am leaving the house unattended," Carlisle said, "especially with humans spending so many hours here alone."

"I have everything sensitive packed well away," Esme assured him. "And I'll be staying the whole time to supervise."

Alice let out a tinkling laugh, and I saw just a glimpse before she blocked me out: Esme, reclining in her lawn chair in her floppy garden hat, complete with giant sunglasses, magazines, and a tall glass of lemonade, shouting her instructions to the sweaty, dirty humans up on the roof.

"I am _not_ staying in the woods all day," Rosalie said firmly, thinking of the first few weeks after Emmett's transformation.

"I've been meaning to get down to Seattle to meet with Jenks again," Jasper told her. "I need to bring him up to speed on the Phone. Want to come along?"

Rosalie shrugged. "Why not? I could do with a couple days' worth of decent shopping."

"Oh, me too!" Alice said eagerly. "I'll meet you there after school each day."

"As long as you're seen coming back to the hotel room each night," Carlisle said. "You can't drive yet, so I'll swing by and pick you up somewhere so that I can drop you off before my shift at the hospital."

"Looks like you and I are going to have some quality bonding time this week, Eddie," Emmett threatened with an evil grin. He reached over and mussed my hair before I had a chance to duck.

"Edward," I sighed, shoving him away.

.

.

.

Three days, ten wrestling matches, and thirty-six games of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds" later, Esme called the hotel and cheerfully announced that our exile was over. She was still determined to surprise everyone but Alice.

"But don't you know what it is, too?" I asked Jasper as we were driving back to the house from Seattle. Or rather, Carlisle was driving and I was sitting in the passenger seat like a sulky fifteen-year-old, hunched over my cell phone, texting Esme to tell her we were almost there and that Rosalie, Emmett, and Alice were minutes behind us. It was a real pain not to let the humans see me driving underage—and even when I did get my license, I'd need to keep the Aston Martin out of public view. That was a crime.

 _Nice try._ Jasper kept a tight grip on his thoughts, focusing on the poetry he was trying to compose for his and Alice's upcoming Diner Day anniversary. As long as he didn't write it down and resolved to whisper it in her ear when the time came, his plan would be impervious to her visions.

"I had a hand in the planning," he said vaguely, looking out the window to further occupy his mind. "But I don't know what the finished product will look like." _Come on, Edward, you know she wants it to be a surprise._

"I admit, I also don't see what all the fuss is about," Carlisle said, making the turn onto our hidden driveway. "She's knocked down houses, added whole floors to houses, designed houses, cottages... and who could forget the Great Treehouse Debacle of '62?"

Jasper and I scoffed simultaneously, the very picture of innocence.

"But she's put a lot of work into this," Carlisle said with a faraway smile, "so we'll all cooperate."

Esme stood on the veranda when we pulled up to the house, buzzing with excitement. I tried to look impressed, though none of the small differences in the property were particularly impressive. She had widened the front yard a bit and the cedars had all been carefully pruned. The driveway had been properly leveled, and the gravel replaced with shells. There were little touches of late-blooming flowers here and there. The whole house seemed to be sighing in relief in a coat of white paint. It looked... happier, as houses go. And I could tell from peeking around the corner that a lot of trees were missing that had been there before.

"It'll be nice not to get leaves in my hair every time I jump out the window," I said, starting to walk around to the back. "Very nice, Esme."

"No, we'll go inside first," Esme insisted, grabbing Carlisle's hand to stop him, too. The others were just pulling up in the Jeep. "All right... ready?"

"Sunshine is here right on schedule," Alice said, scampering to catch up.

Esme threw the front door open, and we all stepped inside. To our surprise, the late afternoon sun shone even brighter inside. The whole house was alight, in fact. Several walls had been torn out and the entire back wall of the first floor—if not the whole house—had been replaced by a glass wall, effectively turning the downstairs into one spacious, open sunroom.

"Incredible," Carlisle said in awe, turning his hand in the sunlight. The glitter on his skin threw rainbows swirling around the walls and ceiling, and even on the trees nearest the windows. "We've never had so much light indoors before. How did you manage it?"

I left them to chatter about the specifics and stepped up into my front room to try the piano. The lush new carpet mellowed the sound nicely, and despite the inhuman glitter on my skin, I rather liked the bright, outdoorsy feeling of having so much light and greenery surrounding me as I played. The windows on this end of the house were no bigger than before, but Esme's design throughout the downstairs seemed to open the whole house up to the sun and even the sounds of the rain forest.

"I love it," I assured her with a quick kiss on the cheek, and I went upstairs to see my room. I smiled when I realized that my south-facing wall had also been torn out and replaced with one clean pane of glass. A quick glimpse into the minds of the others confirmed that the glass did indeed cover the _entire_ southern face of the house. It would have been easy enough to build a house like this, but making the change to an existing one really was an accomplishment; Esme had outdone herself once again.

To make up for the missing wall space in my room, she had filled the right-hand wall with new shelves, stacked only six inches apart: perfect for my ever-expanding CD collection. She had also hung some kind of heavy gold fabric all around, nearly coating every inch of wall space that didn't have shelves ready to go. I couldn't wait to try out the new acoustics once I got my sound system set back up. I decided to also add a set of free-standing shelves to make up for the lost wall space; after all, the couch didn't exactly fill the room.

I was just getting disappointed about not being able to jump out anymore when I noticed a slim handle on the left side of the glass wall. I tugged on it experimentally, surprised when the whole glass wall slid to the side, partially disappearing from view: a giant glass pocket door. I stepped out and dropped to the ground, surprised to see that _all_ the trees in the back had been taken out, all the way to the river. We now had a long green lawn of new sod that stretched to fill the intervening space, and... a beach? Sure enough, she had turned the riverbank into a tiny sandy beach. I wonder...

I leapt back up into my bedroom and turned around to face the open glass wall again. I stepped back a couple of feet and took a running jump, sailing over the new back yard and the river itself to land on the far bank.

Excellent.

"It's beautiful, Esme," Rosalie was saying downstairs. "But what if a human stops by on a sunny day?"

"That's where Jasper's idea comes in," Esme said.

I flitted downstairs curiously, just in time to see Jasper touch a well-hidden panel on the living room wall. A groaning sound drew our attention back to the glass wall. The sunlight dimmed and winked out as long metal shutters drew themselves across the glass panes. Every one of the more conventional windows had been similarly blacked out.

"Nice," I said.

"Weird," Emmett muttered under his breath.

"Just a precaution," Jasper explained. "You know it's rare enough for a human to have a reason to come in. But sometimes they do _see_ inside, and besides, I like the idea of having this for... other scenarios. Those shutters are stronger than they look."

I almost laughed at the absurdity of the scenarios his mind was running through: a rogue newborn following our scent home while Esme was alone, the Volturi coming for us, an army of werewolves circling the house. Maria trying another "friendly visit," or another of his old acquaintances from the Southern Wars coming to exact their revenge. Alice's mystery creator showing up to claim her. Not that the strongest wall in the world would stop any of those attacks, but Jasper was thinking more of this buying us time while we regrouped. If it made him feel better, why not.

We all spent the rest of the evening going over every new detail of the house and yard. Rosalie was especially pleased with the shed Esme had remodeled and expanded into a garage worthy of the Cullen collection.

Jasper grew quieter as the evening wore on. He wasn't looking forward to tomorrow, and the scents of the human workmen that still lingered inside the house weren't helping. He'd done it again—he'd gone too long without exposure to human society, and the next few weeks were going to be an uphill battle. He had enjoyed several months' respite from temptation and the pain of urgent thirst out in the Alaskan wilderness, but he was kicking himself for it now.

"Come on, Jazz," I heard Alice say softly, over across the hall in his office. "Let's go hunt. Just you and me tonight."

I started to call out and stop them, to remind them that it was best to start with half-thirsty brownish eyes, but then I didn't bother. What was the point? The human children seemed less observant every year. And when it came to Jasper's bloodlust, less was more.

.

.

.

"I think they'll be here any minute," Alice said loudly as she carried her lunch tray past some of our peers. "Esme said she'd try to get them here by lunchtime."

"Can't wait," Emmett said, just as loudly, looking bored. He snickered into the giant muffin he was holding up to his mouth. _I can't wait to see the looks on their faces_.

"I wonder if they'll remember meeting you all those years ago," I recited blandly.

That was it; the audience had been primed. Exactly one minute later, half the cafeteria could see the reclusive Mrs. Cullen out in the parking lot, walking up to the main office with two backpack-toting newcomers.

"They really do look alike," Mike Newton said, squinting out the window. I rolled my eyes, seeing the blurred figures in his mind.

Everyone's chatter returned to the mundane, but every eye watched the door, waiting. Lunch was already half over by the time Rosalie made her entrance. As soon as she appeared in the doorway, every mouth stopped chewing, every mind stopped thinking for a second. I could practically hear the swell of the orchestra for all the cinematic grandeur that filled the collective adolescent brain. Rosalie heroically resisted the urge to smile for the figurative camera, remembering that she was supposed to be bereaved and unsure of herself at first.

 _She's so beautiful. I can't believe it. She's so beautiful._ Emmett's thoughts shouted above all the rest, gaping in awe along with his mouth. It wasn't even an act. It was in moments like this when I couldn't deny the envy I felt—the carefully buried wish to know, for myself, the kind of love that the others knew. To really _know_ what it felt like for my mind to turn to mush, for my dead heart to come alive every time I looked at my own mate. To know that she felt the same way when she looked at me...

I dashed the thought away in annoyance, concentrating on the minds around me, checking for danger signs. As usual, the only supernatural allusions had to do with angels—no, there was one mind that actually thought the word _mermaid_ , in the sense of the dangerous sirens of legend. It was one of Jessica Stanley's crowd, Ben, I thought his name was. I'd have to keep an eye on that one. But he was clearly joking with himself; all was well.

Jasper slipped into the room a second later, relatively unnoticed behind his eye-catching twin. He had a fair number of instant admirers, but most of them turned to watch Rosalie again after a few seconds when their instincts shied away. Both Hales slowed to a stop, looking lost.

"Over here," Emmett called out, waving them over to our table. "I'm Emmett," he began, and we made a quiet show of all meeting one another. When we all sat back down, the Hales sat jammed together at the far end of the table opposite the Cullens, somehow managing to look like Greek deities and nervous, subdued teenagers at the same time.

 _All clear?_ Rosalie asked me. I nodded imperceptibly.

"You know, now that you say it, I think I do remember meeting you once," she said aloud to Emmett.

"I was just thinking the same thing," he said, scooting his chair closer to hers—a lot closer. Eyebrows shot up all over the room.

"You couldn't have waited until tomorrow to 'hook up'?" I sighed, picking at the glob of pasta on my tray.

 _Give us some credit_ , he and Rosalie thought simultaneously, both thinking of how fun it was going to be to let the football team think they had a sporting chance. _We're not even touching._ I smiled down at the pasta glob despite myself. They wouldn't make it past next Tuesday, and they knew it.


	5. Close Calls

Rosalie and Emmett didn't even make it to Friday afternoon. By the time school let out for the weekend, the whole school was abuzz with the gossip about "Dr. and Mrs. Cullen's Matchmaking Service omggggg maybe they'll adopt ME." I kept an ear out for anything suspicious, but everything was going according to the script.

Alice and Jasper, at least, had the self-restraint to drag the fun out a little before we settled in for three years of utter monotony. I was grateful; the longer Jasper stayed unattached, the longer I could put off being the center of far too many daydreams. His admirers were generally more circumspect than mine—they sensed, somehow, that he was more dangerous than I, and tended to keep their distance—but he would break his fair share of hearts when the time came, as he always did.

"Jasper just seems so _mysterious_ ," Jessica Stanley whispered to Alice in the lunch line the next Wednesday. "What's he like?" My ears perked up instantly; maybe I'd finally be able to shake her loose. She'd never looked twice at Emmett.

"I don't really know," Alice said breezily, reaching for a container of yogurt. "He keeps to himself, mostly. I don't think I've heard ten words out of him since he and Rosalie moved in last week."

"He seems... on edge somehow," Jessica prompted.

Alice shrugged. "New school jitters, I guess? Maybe he needs a friend." When Jessica turned to look back at the vampire in question, Alice gave me a wink.

 _Best sister ever_ , I mouthed at her.

_You're welcome!_

"So... you don't mind if I...?" Jessica hinted.

"Not at all."

This was going swimmingly. When we sat down at the outcast table, Jasper was holding his unopened milk carton up to his mouth to hide his smirk. Everything Alice did was adorable in his book.

"Have fun," Alice whispered, taking the seat farthest away and studiously ignoring him.

"You're a dangerous creature, ma'am," he said under his breath.

"I know," she sang just as quietly, looking back at Jessica to give her a big smile and a thumbs-up.

"She is so _weird_ ," Jessica's friend Lauren muttered.

"Yeah," Jessica said quickly. "But nice I guess?"

"That Jasper though..." Lauren's thoughts took a predatory turn. "Mmm."

 _Crap_ , Jessica sighed mentally, shifting her attention back to me again. Lauren clearly outranked her in the social hierarchy; she had laid her claim and that was that.

Great. Just great.

.

.

.

"Paintball this weekend!" Emmett announced on his way out the door that afternoon. He was going to pick up whatever mad scientist ingredients were necessary for vampire paintball, and he was confident his top secret plans were going to work. Emmett always drove me up the wall whenever he decided to block me out; instead of focusing on something complex, as the others tended to do, his favorite method was to mentally replay my least favorite music at an inhuman volume.

"Disco-Tex and the Sex-o-Lettes?!" I muttered, dumping a gargantuan pile of mail all over the dining room table. "Really?!"

_Machine gun rap and lo-co-mote... haha!_

"Shut up!"

"I beg your pardon?" Esme said, giving me a sharp look as she walked into the room.

"Not you!" I promised, holding my hands up in surrender. "It's just that _some_ people need to _let seventies music die already_ —"

 _Is that a challenge?!_ Emmett's thoughts mercifully began to fade away with distance.

"What a mess," Esme sighed, beginning to sift through the mail.

We began to sort it all out. Every time we moved, it was like this; it couldn't be helped, especially when Alice was having this much fun in a bull market. Even with Jenks and his team of forgers and other "specialists," we always spent the first several weeks changing addresses, writing to the Denalis and various red-eyed friends, erasing our electronic trails from the previous location, and generally managing the absolute mess of identities that we had accumulated over the years.

"Oh! Here's one for Anthony Masen," Esme said, passing me an envelope.

"Seriously?" I sighed, ripping it open. "We killed him off almost a decade ago."

"No good deed goes unpunished," Esme said kindly, reaching out and touching my shoulder. _You know how proud I am of you, even if it did get complicated._

"Thanks, Mom," I said dutifully, dodging away from the kiss she tried to plant on my cheek. I let her catch me in the end, as I always did.

Anthony Masen, lawyer and philanthropist, had died unexpectedly back in 1994 despite only being in his late forties. We'd had no choice; a couple of journalists had started sniffing around when some college professor or other had written a newspaper article about how the Masen Foundation was changing lives through its music scholarship fund for low-income students. It was the first time any of us "kids" had started an organization of our own, and Carlisle had been uncharacteristically hands-off as I navigated the tricky waters of having a false identity start up a real foundation.

"This is your project, Edward," he had said firmly. "The whole experience will be more rewarding if you manage everything yourself."

He had been right; it had brought me a great deal of meaning. We had already been involved in philanthropy by that point—we had to do something with Alice's earnings, after all, and Carlisle had insisted—but it _had_ felt different to direct that philanthropy myself. I still had all the student applications that had ever been turned in. Each one was a life that was a stranger to me, but something about my distant connection to those students made me keep them. Some of those kids had gone on to be professional musicians; two were now touring internationally. To know that I had, in my small, distant way, been a part of those journeys meant a great deal to me.

So it had been a real disappointment when we had been obliged to shut the whole thing down. The newspaper article had led to the journalists, and one of those journalists had done a little too much digging. There were hints that an investigation into the foundation's "accounting irregularities" might be warranted, and that was the end of that. Anthony Masen took a discreet trip overseas, died in a car accident, and left most of his money to another foundation.

I still hadn't decided what do to next. It had been nearly a decade, and it felt odd not to have an invented identity out there, actively living out Edward Masen's legacy on paper. Anthony Masen had never named any children or heirs besides Robert Masen, some vague relative. For now the name was just a placeholder, a blank identity with no details filled in yet, not even a social security number or a decision about how he was related to Anthony. I did miss being actively involved in philanthropy; I still flushed out millions every year to the various funds and organizations that I had hand-picked, same as all my siblings, but it wasn't the same. Maybe once the flurry of moving died down, I'd do something about it. I glanced at the letter briefly. It was a quarterly report on one of the mutual funds we still had going from Anthony's estate, held in trust for Robert. Maybe that fund could be my starting point, if I wanted to get going again. I balanced the letter on the teetering pile of my charity-related mail, reaching for the next handful of envelopes. Beside me, Esme was filling out a change-of-address form at vampire speed.

"Carlisle's home," I told her, turning my head to the familiar sound of my father's thoughts. A moment later, we heard the powerful rumble of the Mercedes turning off the main road.

_You won't believe the day I've had!_

Carlisle burst in the kitchen door a moment later, grinning from ear to ear. He swooped down to receive Esme's welcome-home kiss and poured another mountain of mail on the table out of a bulky package. There was so _much_ mail—especially in the beginning of a new move—that we couldn't risk raising the postal workers' interest by receiving each piece separately. One of Jenks's "services" was routing a good chunk of that mail to us via packages like this one.

"You're in a good mood," I teased, catching the tallest pile of papers—Alice's investment reports—just as Carlisle's new addition sent it tumbling off the edge. Those "Go Paperless" campaigns were starting to look better and better. We could singlehandedly save a whole forest at the rate we were going.

"Indeed I am," he said, kissing Esme again for good measure. "Days like this... they make everything doubly worthwhile."

"Tell us," Esme said with a knowing smile. She pushed out the chair beside her with her foot, paperwork forgotten. He sat down and took her hand.

"A man was brought in after a motorcycle accident," he began. "It didn't look good; his blood pressure was already threatening to bottom out. Extensive road rash, compound ulnar and femoral fractures... and a suspected open-book pelvic fracture. The paramedics had a binder on him already, and Dr. Snow called for a helicopter as soon as he was brought in. Forks is only a Level IV trauma center. Everyone said it was too late—and it would have been, if I had let them waste any more time.

"I took over immediately. I nearly got fired on the spot, and I may still face a lawsuit for breaking protocol if he doesn't make it in the end. But I'm confident he will. I suspected a rupture of the iliolumbar vessels. I opened right up and started with the gauze packing, and we didn't even have the right kind of arterial balloon but I managed to get them all distracted so I could get the sutures done at _my_ speed—oh, I'm sorry, Edward..."

My throat flared at the bloody imagery as Carlisle chattered on at superspeed, but his good mood was infectious. He _lived_ for scenarios like this, the times when he was able to save a patient when no one else could, either because of his acute senses, his vast experience, or his ability to operate at vampire speed when he could get everyone else to look away for a moment. Or all three, in this case. Carlisle looked so happy on days like this, so _young._

"We still had him lifted to Harborview in Seattle in the end," he said in conclusion, "but he was already stabilized. Dr. Snow is still upset at how I had taken over—I actually shoved him out of my way!—but even he can't deny that I had saved a life he had already pronounced lost. Once we were cleaned up, he took me out to the lobby himself and told the patient's friend—none other than our local chief of police—about my being a miracle worker."

"Only three weeks this time," Esme said, gazing at him with adoring eyes. "Only three weeks and you're already the Miracle Worker." Carlisle smiled bashfully at her praise, then went on to describe how Chief Swan had nearly broken down right there in the ER lobby, gushing his gratitude for Carlisle's heroic rescue. Apparently one of the nurses had already let it slip that his buddy wasn't going to make it, and it sounded like he had personal experience with motorcycle fatalities, making him doubly in awe of today's outcome and of the Miracle Worker.

Carlisle tended to accumulate nicknames wherever he worked: any number of variations on the themes of Doogie Howser and Miracle Worker. His fellow physicians either loved or hated him, but in the end, they always came to respect his expertise and rely upon it. Having made some minor forays into the medical field myself, I was most in awe of Carlisle's ability to take decisive action during blood-soaked emergencies. He took risks most emergency physicians wouldn't dream of, and they nearly always turned out for the best. And I couldn't _imagine_ being able to open up a pelvic cavity full of two liters of gushing blood and get right to work.

"Chief Swan sounds like a good man," Esme said fondly.

"I think so, too," Carlisle agreed. He was picturing a nondescript middle-aged man with brown hair and a mustache. The man's chocolate-brown eyes teared up as he acknowledged Carlisle's help. "We talked for a bit. He lives alone, though his daughter occasionally comes to visit in the summertime. He's an avid fisherman—he even asked me if I would like to join him out in his boat someday."

"That'd be a good trick," I said, rolling my eyes. Fishing and vampires didn't mix: hours of sunshine with no escape, fish getting frightened away, sharp hooks in human fingers, close observation... Carlisle smiled sadly, going on to say how he had politely declined but thanked Chief Swan for the invitation.

It was a shame; like Alice, Carlisle would have loved to have a human friend. Someone he could be fully honest with, or at least someone he could bond with over the things he _would_ be able to talk about. But experience had taught us to keep our human peers at arms' length. It was better that way... for all of us. And Fate seemed determined to remind us of that fact. The very next day gave us a scare like we hadn't had in years.

It had begun like any other school day: rainy. Esme would take Alice and me to school while Rosalie drove Emmett and Jasper.

"The BMW, Rosalie?" I complained on my way into the garage. "It's bad enough that you and Emmett are already making out all over Forks High, but the _BMW_? Could you _be_ any more conspicuous?"

Rosalie settled for mental insults since Esme was present. She serenely combed her fingers back through her hair, holding the middle finger aloft.

"Oh, very mature," I scoffed.

"Edward," Esme scolded.

"You're just jealous 'cause you can't drive yet," Emmett said with a devilish grin. "You have to wait... what? Three more months?"

"Nine months," I said through my teeth. "I am _not_ going to Driver's Ed."

"Just fake it," he offered.

"Not a good idea in a small town," Jasper said. His hand lingered on Alice's cheek as he got into the back seat of the BMW. She smiled blankly, brushing a kiss against his fingers as they pulled away, scanning his future as she always did when they parted ways.

"Oh! You juniors will all have to ditch Biology tomorrow," she told them as Rosalie started the car. "Blood typing."

"Thanks," Rosalie said, and they were off.

"How do other vampire high schoolers manage without a fortune teller?" Esme said, smiling up at Alice in the rear-view mirror when we got into the Mercedes.

"Must be why we're the only ones. Aren't we lucky," I said, looking over to Alice for her saucy comeback. But she was far away, still combing through Jasper's day. It had been years since his last accident, but she was just as overprotective as he was. She did it for most of the drive, resisting the urge to chew on her ragged thumbnail.

"He'll be fine, Alice," I said, not looking up from the stack of mail I was still working on while we drove.

_I know he will. I just don't like him being alone when he's at school._

This was only the second time we had done this—Jasper attending some of his classes without any of us sitting in the same room... ready to hold him back or get him out if trouble should arise.

"It's a risk," I admitted, "but you know he hates it when we hover."

 _He does._ Alice smiled sadly, forcing herself to think about something else. But her thoughts shifted almost immediately into Korean.

It had been a fun challenge at first, keeping up with Alice's language spree back in the '50 and '60s. But somewhere along the way it had finally dawned on me that she really did want to be able to do this in order to keep me out sometimes, that she had only been half joking every time she dared me to keep up. So I had conceded defeat and begun the interesting challenge of trying to _not_ learn a language through mental immersion. But seriously, what was it with everyone this week?

"Not you too," I sighed. "What is this, Keep Edward Out week?"

"What?"

"Nothing. What's the big secret?"

"There's no secret. Just..." _I don't know. There's something, and I'm not sure what it is. Something about moving here, to this place... something big and I can't make sense of it, so I'm not sharing, not yet. It's one of those destiny things, I think._

"I see."

I didn't see. But I understood the distinction; sometimes Alice was sure that her visions, at least some of the more significant ones, were more about destiny than they were about choices. More of a fantasy element than a science fiction one, as it were, in this bizarre undeath we were living out. Her first visions of Jasper and of all of us had been like that—not necessarily the natural, logical result of anyone's decision... the visions had come before the decisions. More a matter of instructions, or of _direction_. Of destiny.

We went on to Chem and began the day, each of us listening in our own paranormal way to the Lauren/Jasper gossip to entertain ourselves. A good third of the school, by my estimation, had decided his surrender was inevitable. Maybe we should take bets. Over on the other side of the main building, Emmett was thinking the same thing, jokingly wondering what odds we should offer, when I was violently wrenched back by Alice's mind.

_Jazz NO!_

We were both already out in the rain, sprinting across the school grounds toward Jasper's Biology class as the vision of a massacre unfolded. I reached the little building first.

"How long do I have?" I hissed back to her.

_At least five seconds... just get his attention, it'll be OK!_

It had better! My hand ached to wrench the door open and yank my brother out to safety, but instead I zipped around the side and tapped on the window near his seat. He turned his head too slowly, wasting nearly one of the five seconds. The visions hadn't fully disappeared yet. I wondered, with a lump in my throat, whether Alice's vague feeling of destiny this morning was about to explain itself in the most tragic of ways.

"I was going to do this lab tomorrow," the teacher was saying, reaching into a box on his desk, _but I broke the VCR again..._ "but since the weather isn't cooperating..."

When Jasper saw my frantic expression and noticed Alice running up close behind me, he lurched to his feet and stopped breathing instantly, as he had trained himself to do when he saw this particular warning in our eyes. "Excuse me," he said tightly, and carefully threaded his way through the aisle of feet and backpacks on his way to the door. Of all the times for him to be so good at the human charade! Come on, come _on_...

"... this is a good day for us to learn our blood types," the teacher finished just as Jasper reached the door. The groans began, and instead of pushing the door open, Jasper heard the word _blood_ and turned around in surprise. Just in time to see the teacher puncture his own finger, holding it up in cheerful demonstration.

Alice streaked past me and pulled the door open just as the future began to fall apart again. Jasper was still standing there, one hand reaching out toward us and the open door, staring back at the teacher and his bleeding hand. He was quickly losing the battle with himself, just beginning to lean forward, his shoulders bunching together in preparation for the attack. The burst of fresh air wasn't helping in the slightest. I lunged forward at human speed and and tore him right out of the classroom. Just as I should have done in the _first place._

 _Mine—!_ Jasper twisted and easily broke my rain-soaked grasp, ready to fight me off, but his sanity began to return when he heard Alice's soothing voice in his ear. He hadn't fully lost it, then.

Alice raked her hands down his face, forcing him to look into her eyes. "It's OK Jazz, ssh, I'm... wait, Edward, wait..."

The future swirled, attacking us yet again with its warning. This time the teacher was dead in Jasper's hands outside the classroom, right here. And we couldn't run away at normal speed; the teacher was already coming toward us.

"Is there a problem out here?" he demanded, holding up his bloodied finger to point at me. "What are you..." he trailed off, staring blankly up into Jasper's murderous expression.

"He's OK," I said, getting a death grip around Jasper's waist again. Alice was a little entranced by the blood herself, but she tightened her grip on Jasper's hand and we both began to pull him away. Mercifully, he let us do it.

"He just gets upset sometimes," I mumbled over my shoulder, scrambling to try and think of something to explain how Alice and I had just happened to be on hand to prevent a murder. "He'll be all right in a minute."

The teacher's mouth had gone dry, working uselessly to challenge my explanation, but we weren't sticking around to finish the job. We manhandled Jasper away from the building until he was able to walk on his own without turning around to kill.

"I'm fine now," he hissed, throwing off our hands for the second time. He stalked away from the school, straight into the forest.

Alice wrung her hands, inching after him. "Jazz, are you sure you—"

"I'm _FINE_ ," he shouted back from the trees that had already obscured him. He picked up into a run and we let him go.

"Everything OK now?" I asked Alice in a low voice, glancing back toward the teacher. The audience wasn't as large as I had feared—just one other teacher and a good chunk of the Biology class.

_Murder-wise, yes... damage control–wise, I don't know... give me a second..._

The Biology teacher finally found his voice. "Can you two explain what just—"

"Jasper and his twin sister just moved here last week," Alice blurted out, groping blindly for each word as her visions led. "They're staying with us. Their mom died last year and... well, we just met so I don't really know all the details, but Jasper has kind of been through a lot. Sometimes he just really needs to get away, to put some space between him and everyone else."

"He looked like..." _Like he was about to kill me!_ "like he was about to lose it." _And how did these two—_

"He'll be fine now," I assured the teacher smoothly. "He had a hard morning today at home and I was actually just coming to check on him." I stared into his eyes, trying my best to play the gentle, worried brother. Like it was perfectly reasonable for such a brother to cut class and come and check on the foster kid who had moved in last week, just in case he was in the mood to fall apart and possibly kill someone.

"You came at a good time," the teacher said slowly. I watched carefully, gratefully, as his primitive brain reorganized what he had seen according to the new information we had just given him. Humans were good for that; feed them lies that were close enough to the truth, and their faulty memories would adjust as needed. His memory of Jasper's face was already changing: instead of being on the verge of murder, Jasper had been on the verge of tears, of shouting some profane outburst or starting a fight. It was still a frightening enough image, but I didn't see any immediate plans to call the police. That was something, I supposed, and there was no hint of the supernatural anywhere in his mind.

The teacher blinked a couple of times, then turned around. "Show's over, everyone. Let's get back to class. Everyone pick up a blood typing kit on the way back in..."

I ducked into their classroom briefly and gathered Jasper's things. Alice and I started moving back toward our building slowly, gelling with the crowd of students until we had passed them all by.

"Well?" Alice asked me.

"I'm fairly sure he's buying the hints about PTSD," I reported, still listening intently. "He's planning to tell the principal and the school counselor about it... I don't hear any other plans. No suspicions beyond human possibilities. You?"

She was so deep in her visions that I had to steer her as she walked. "Good so far, we're definitely coming to school tomorrow..." _Jasper too. "_ But what happened? He was going to do the blood typing tomorrow!"

"He broke the VCR and changed his plans."

"Humans can be so _stupid!"_ she huffed, picking up her pace. "A broken VCR isn't worth dying over!"

I glanced around, eyes and gift, then pulled the cell phone out of my jacket pocket. "I'll leave Carlisle a text about what happened. Can you get Esme up to speed before they call home?"

"On it." She dashed into the main building and whispered something to the receptionist about having a feminine emergency. She was waved right in ahead of the two girls who had been waiting in line for the bathroom. While I typed the message to Carlisle—scrolling through the number keys to type each letter was _infuriating_ —I kept tabs on Jasper's teacher as well as Alice's call and her constant supervision of Jasper's flight through the woods.

_J had an incident just now, but everyone is fine. School may be calling. J went off alone, should be OK. Not urgent unless I text again, will catch you up tonight._

I never got a response. Cell phones weren't allowed in school, so I didn't want to keep trying, and the reception was so spotty that I couldn't be sure he had even gotten my message.

"It's all right," Alice said when she joined us at the lunch table. "I called Esme, she called Carlisle, everyone's up to speed... except Jasper."

"Where is he now?" Rosalie asked, worried.

Alice shrugged. "I don't know. In the woods somewhere... he just wants to be alone for a while." _And he knows I can't find him in the woods._ She was trying not to feel hurt by that.

"He just needs a little time," I told her gently. "He can't be looking forward to everything we'll have to go over tonight."

_I know. I just wish..._

"Everything looks good," she told the others brightly. "He's still coming back to school with us tomorrow. No problems."

"You know," Emmett said, picking up Rosalie's hand and studying her fingers, "sometimes when the person you love most is hurting, the best way to hold them tight is to wait until they're ready to be held."

"And they love you all the more for it," Rosalie added softly. They were thinking in unison again, remembering all the times she had needed her space. She squeezed Emmett's hand back, giving him the kind of glance that always made him stop breathing.

"Emmett," Alice said with a tremulous smile, "that's so—"

"So!" he said, sitting up straighter. "I was thinking we could give the Lauren/Jasper shippers odds of five to one, now that he's even more—"

"NO, Emmett!"

.

.

.

I didn't blame Jasper one bit for putting off the family meeting. But as nine o'clock rolled by, and then ten o'clock, I was starting to lose my patience. He _knew_ Carlisle had the 11-7 shift tonight.

"I can call out if need be," Carlisle assured us, but that was when I heard Jasper's thoughts approaching. Alice slipped out and went to meet him in the yard while the rest of us waited around the dining room table.

"Sorry," Jasper said when they finally came back in a moment later. He was sopping wet from his hours out in the rain. "I needed a good long hunt. And... I'm also sorry about today." He looked around, letting us all see his golden eyes and feel the regret and the gratitude he was radiating.

"It ended well," Carlisle told him warmly. "And even if it hadn't, you know we would have understood."

"Nothing happened," Emmett said with a generous shrug. We all murmured varying degrees of reassurance and Jasper grudgingly accepted them, apologizing again a couple of times. The usual.

"The school counselor called this afternoon," Esme began, and we got down to business. No, the teacher hadn't filed a disciplinary notice. Yes, the principal had filed an incident report. Yes, the school counselor had bought the PTSD story without pressing for too many details. Yes, she was "strongly suggesting" that Jasper resume some kind of talk therapy and at least one visit with a licensed psychologist. No, none of it had to be at the school and updates from the therapist we chose would not be required. Yes, the counselor would like to speak to Jasper at least twice—once tomorrow and once a month from now to "touch base."

"I really do think they're just concerned," Esme assured Jasper. "It's more about helping you than anything else. They mean well."

"I can prepare whatever you need as evidence of the medical visits and therapy appointments," Carlisle put in. "Though I don't think we should submit anything they don't ask for. And... what do you think about switching out of that particular class? As a junior, you're not required to take Bio II. You can choose another advanced science."

"That might be wise," Jasper said. "He really was afraid for his life, for a moment there. No need to keep bringing that up every day." _For both our sakes._ "And... Carlisle? I'd like to speak to you in private, if you have the time."

"Of course," Carlisle said. "I'll call out." He got up to head to the telephone.

"Do you think that's wise?" Esme asked him. "After what happened yesterday? I know you aren't really in trouble, but you're sure to be on everyone's mind today, especially if they've heard about what happened at school."

"Why, what happened yesterday?" Jasper asked.

"Nothing major," Carlisle assured him. He opened his mouth to explain, then thought about all the blood in the story. "I just stepped on a few toes, that's all."

"I can wait, then," Jasper said. "I'll come meet you in the hospital parking lot after your shift, then you can drop me at school afterwards."

"You don't have to drive that far to get away from me, you know," I told Jasper once the plans were settled and the others had gone about their business. I smiled wryly, knowing he could tell I wasn't really annoyed.

"I know," he said. _I know you understand. Thanks._

"I'll give you total privacy, too," Alice promised him.

Jasper didn't answer out loud; it was one of those moments when they didn't need to say anything, or even touch. When I could only look away and leave them to their love... trying not to desperately wish I could understand it for myself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jasper had a lot to say in this chapter, so I've also posted an outtake in his POV that covers the near-miss here as well as his talk with Carlisle and his meeting with the school counselor. Like all Tale of Years outtakes and one-shots, it can be found in the story named "Tale of Years One-Shots and Outtakes" as chapter 40: Someone to Watch Over Me. 
> 
> Also... MIDNIGHT SUN IS ALMOST HERE! Oh my gosh you guys... I'M SO EXCITED! So I'll be pausing my updates of this story for a little while, just in case we get some new content that I want to use/foreshadow in the final chapters here. In the meantime, happy reading and please consider donating to the Quileute Nation's Move to Higher Ground project at MTHG dot org. They're building a new tribal school away from the tsunami danger zone and there are several smaller initiative as well,. As Twilight fans I think this is a project that should be near and dear to our hearts.


	6. Weirder Every Time

**A quick note on the previous chapter, for those who don't yet have the one-shots collection on their alerts: Jasper had a lot to say during that chapter, so I've also posted an outtake in his POV called "Someone to Watch Over Me" (chapter 40). It also extends into part of this chapter.**

**And now it's about time to wrap up this story! This will be the final chapter before the 2005 epilogue, which will be set on the day Bella arrives and will lead right into the first words of _Midnight Sun_. I've had a lot of fun with foreshadowing in this story in particular since we're getting so close to the "present day" of the saga. Thank you all again for your reviews and asks and encouragement. I truly couldn't do this without you!**

**Disclaimer: This chapter contains direct quotes from _Midnight Sun_. Stephenie Meyer owns it all!**

* * *

"Alice," I scolded.

"I'm _trying_ ," she whined. Jasper had left on foot an hour ago to meet with Carlisle at the hospital, and Alice was having a hard time keeping her promise not to peek in.

"Could you two occasionally speak in full sentences like normal people?" Rosalie said, checking her lipstick in the visor mirror. She and Alice were trying a new brand of makeup this week, hoping it would stick to their marble skin better than most.

Alice squirmed in the back seat beside me. Trying _not_ to watching Jasper only made it more difficult. She decided instead to try and think of some kind of gift or surprise that might cheer him up. Her visions stretched a little farther forward, balancing on the edge of her rapid-fire decisions as she tried to tease out what the surprise could be.

"Oh!" she said after a few minutes, suddenly sitting up higher. _That's perfect!_

"Good idea," I agreed, watching along as Saturday's new future unfolded. "You can borrow the Volvo if you want."

"Aw, not the Vanquish?"

"Most _certainly_ not the Vanquish." Alice's visions made her an unpredictable driver. That was putting it mildly.

"Gifties," Emmett muttered, snaking an arm around Rosalie's shoulders while she drove.

"Normies," I scoffed back. "Listen, Emmett, we'll need two extra paintball guns on Saturday."

"No problem." Emmett's mind seized, protective of the paintball secrets again. He grinned and caught my eye in the mirror.

"Don't," I growled.

"Don't what?"

"Don't do whatever it is you're planning."

"You don't even know what—"

"Don't need to."

"Ooh, no, do it!" Alice sang, bouncing up on her knees.

Rosalie shoved the gas pedal to the floor, deciding then and there that her next car would be a roadster with two seats.

.

.

.

Alice and I parked ourselves outside the main office to listen, but it turned out that we weren't needed. Jasper passed his appointment with the school counselor with flying colors, even when she noticed one of the scars on his neck and jaw, which was a rare complication. He also talked her out of bringing _me_ in for a session about how to manage homicidal siblings. I owed him one.

"It's all right," I assured him when he came out. "She connected the scar to the car accident right away. And... thanks."

"You're welcome."

His eyes caught on the nearest human walking by. The scent made his throat flare more than usual, and I swallowed when I felt the pain in my own throat via my gift. Neither of us was looking forward to the increased difficulty he would be having over the next few weeks. It was always like this when he or Emmett had one of their near-misses; the fact that the human's life had been saved at the last minute didn't stop those predatory instincts from rising back to the surface again. At least he was planning to stay in school this time.

But as the morning went on and I monitored his thoughts—the days following a near-miss were as dangerous as they were difficult—it looked like Jasper was planning to do more than just stick it out. He had apparently come away from his talk with Carlisle with the distinct impression that he needed to up his game.

Jasper's war against his thirst had been long and hard-fought, and I had been the unlucky telepathic bystander for more of that war than I would have liked. I had to admit that he had come a long way; when he and Alice had first joined the family, he had needed to feed every single day and he wasn't able to be around humans at all. Now he could play human with the best of us—with a certain amount of strain—and he usually hunted every five days or so. But now he was planning to stretch out the times between hunting longer and longer, struggling against the edge of his self-control in order to strengthen it.

It was a wretched idea. The theory was sound, but if he couldn't control himself as it was, which of our classmates would be the first casualty when he decided to make it even harder on himself? I had tried something like this myself once. The results had nearly been disastrous, and he _knew_ that.

"You've got to be joking," I told him at lunch.

 _Don't you dare_ , Alice warned, giving me a pointed look.

"At least wait until next time," I said. "You've already come within an inch of murder and landed in the counselor's office, and it's only the second week!"

"Edward, cut it out," Alice hissed.

"What?" Emmett said, already annoyed.

Jasper shook his head. "I'll always have an excuse to put it off."

"You know how this could end up," I shot back.

He rolled his eyes and stabbed his fork clean through the orange on his tray. _Edward, I'm not you. I'm not going to run up alone into the Arctic and starve myself._

I ground my teeth together. "Be that as it may, I still think—"

"I'll take it slow," he insisted. "Six days, then seven. No rush. If I ever get to two weeks, I'll probably stop there. It was Carlisle's idea," he added, punctuating his argument with a burst of anger from his gift. He finally saw the orange he had impaled with his fork and dropped it onto the tray with disgust, pulling Alice tighter against him.

They were practically glued together as it was. There was no nonsense anymore about the two of them not being a "thing"; Jasper needed Alice's calming touch now and the game went right out the window. At least they were rarely demonstrative like Rosalie and Emmett, in front of the humans at least. But I had the distinct displeasure of listening to Lauren and Jessica's petty thoughts for the rest of the lunch period. For all I knew, the agitation pouring off Jasper in waves was half the reason for their vitriol. Lauren was convinced that she still had a shot with Jasper if she could just convince everyone that Alice was some kind of freak. Jessica knew she didn't have a chance, but she was mad at Alice for her now-apparent lie the other day. She, too, was cooking up some gossip to get Alice back with.

They were both lucky that Jasper didn't have my gift. He usually didn't spare a thought for the human drama surrounding our oddness beyond his usual concern for our safety, but considering the mood he was in today, he might make an exception if he knew who their target was.

One would think that turning against Alice would make Jessica less interested in me, but apparently that wasn't the way it worked. Her girlish fantasies turned more explicit and her little hints became more urgent almost at once, as if some third adopted sister might materialize any minute and steal me away if she didn't hurry me along. It was _absurd_.

By Friday afternoon I had had enough. We were going into World History and she jumped to catch up with me just as I passed through the doorway so that we would end up squeezing through together. She giggled at the "coincidence" and grabbed onto me for balance, slipping her hand underneath my shirt, vividly picturing what else she would like to do with that hand. Once we were inside, I turned and gave her a withering glare.

"Look, Miss Stanley," I said curtly, "I'm flattered by your attentions. But I'm not interested in you or any of your little friends, all right?"

She blinked, stunned and immeasurably hurt... more than I had thought she would be. I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose in frustration. "I'm... sorry," I sighed. "It's just that I'm not interested in dating, period. It has nothing to do with you. Really, it doesn't. I wish you every happiness."

"You really thought I was into _you_?" she said with a laugh that came out a little too high. _Don't cry, ugh, don't you dare cry!_ "Whatever."

"My mistake," I said smoothly. She stormed past me and took her seat, as far as possible from "our little corner," as she had thought of it since day one.

Over in building three, Alice was having an especially miserable day. Lauren had been busy; the incest gossip was ramping up again and all sorts of unflattering adjectives were being whispered along with Alice's name. There was also a rumor that Lauren had had a little interlude with Jasper in the music room the other day, although she had been careful not to appear to be the one who had started the rumor. And when Alice had tried to sit with her human "friends" at lunch today, Jessica's icy glare had steered her right back to our outcast table. To be fair, Alice deserved the glare itself; she hadn't known the game would end so soon, and so for all intentions and purposes, she _had_ stolen Jasper, albeit from someone who had already given up her own pursuit.

The whole drama spelled an abrupt, early death to Alice's usual misguided attempt to fit in. The attempt failed every time anyway, and her effort was more half-hearted each time around, but it was still a hard blow. Meanwhile, now that Jasper was snatched up, the daydreams about _me_ were on the rise again. And Jasper was more agitated with each passing day, still angry at himself for the near-miss and dreading the coming pain of his little plan, to say nothing of his annoyance at how the humans were treating Alice. Emmett was still pouting over the football thing—the coach was still dropping hints—and Rosalie was in a bad mood because he was in a bad mood. She was also a little annoyed that _their_ interlude in the music room wasn't being talked about.

Ah, high school.

.

.

.

The weekend, and paintball with it, couldn't come soon enough. Even Carlisle was a little on edge. His pelvic fracture patient from the other day was barely hanging on by a thread and there were indeed hints of an impending lawsuit, which meant that a whole other level of identity management headaches might be coming our way. And Jasper's mood went even further south when Alice abruptly disappeared with the Volvo that night, leaving a note that she needed to fly to New York immediately to help with the debut of her newest designs, which had been moved up because of a scheduling conflict. It was a ridiculous excuse, but Jasper bought it. So now he was thirsty _and_ lonely _and_ annoyed that Alice had decided he shouldn't be on a plane right now _and_ ashamed because she was right.

I finally took pity on him around three in the morning. "She was lying," I announced, barging into his office, where he working half-heartedly on an experiment involving a fiberoptic something-or-other. "There was no fashion debut, no plane trip. She's cooking up a surprise for you."

"Oh. Well... thanks for ruining it, I guess."

"Do us all a favor and go kill something, would you?"

He frowned up at me from the couch. "Edward, you know I'm going to wait—"

"I know," I interrupted. "I'm not trying to talk you out of it. Just make an exception this time, all right? It's been a hard week for all of us and you're making everybody in this house miserable. In fact, I'd wager that you're making all of Forks High miserable. We all need to have fun tomorrow, so please, _go_."

He reluctantly agreed, and Emmett and Rosalie decided to go too. Carlisle was still at work and Esme was deeply absorbed in a painting, so the relative mental silence was an indescribable relief. I headed straight for the piano—I wasn't having much luck with repairing the piano out at "my" cottage—to do a little composing, if only to cheer Esme up. She was having a bad day too. Apparently, someone's mother had invited her to a garden party scheduled for this morning and she had happily accepted, only to cancel at the last minute after Alice's weather report. The woman in question hadn't seemed to buy her excuse and future invitations were unlikely to come. Like Alice, Esme wished each time that she could have some semblance of a human friend, and, like Alice, she was freshly disappointed every time.

I warmed up with Chopin, savoring the quiet complexity of two of my favorite nocturnes. I should compose a nocturne too, I decided; it had been a while, and with the week we'd had, a little faux sleepiness was looking pretty good.

But whenever I tried out the little tunes that kept teasing at the back of my mind, I ended up playing bits of other compositions I'd made or pieces by other composers. I settled on one particular theme and even then, no luck. I could feel inspiration tickling right on the edge of my mind, but I couldn't bring it out. And it wasn't just my current mood. I'd had this trouble for a while now, and I had to admit it wasn't just the usual dry spell. I had composed so _many_ songs by now that even when I had a new idea, my fingers kept drifting back toward something I'd already written.

The inspiration just wasn't coming like it used to. There had been years where my brain had been bursting with melodies so insistent that I spent entire days and nights composing movement after movement without coming up for air. But now... maybe it had all been played. Maybe the muse tended to dry up for good once a vampire passed the 100-year mark, or something like that. Whatever the problem was, I didn't feel like grappling with it tonight. After an hour of trying, I gave up and went in search of a book.

"Done already?" Esme asked from her art room as I passed by. I shrugged and walked on.

.

.

.

Alice didn't make it back as early as she had thought she would, so she sent me a text message that we should go on ahead to the playing field and that she would meet us there, surprise and all.

Emmett had decided to shift the boundaries half a mile north of where we had been before. He had all the equipment ready to go at the field, locked away in a well-hidden storage locker. The storm clouds were already gathering in an ominous swirl above our heads, right on schedule.

"All right, Emmett," Carlisle said. "Let's see what you've come up with."

Emmett opened the locker with a flourish and started handing out the guns. I caught mine in the air and examined it curiously. It looked more like an old-fashioned hunting rifle than anything else.

"Where are the paintballs?" Rosalie asked. "Isn't there supposed to be a canister that feeds them into the chamber?"

"We're not using paintballs this time," Emmett said. "We're using paint _bullets_. Check this out." He held up a shiny new cartridge. It was over two inches long and the bullet had been partially hollowed out to provide a tiny reservoir for the paint. "This, my friends, is the grand old Winchester .220 Swift, circa 1935. Very good year."

"Wait a minute," Esme said, frowning as she tried to figure out the bolt action magazine on her rifle. "Are you saying we're going to be playing with real guns, _real_ bullets?"

Emmett rolled his eyes. "It's fine, Ma," he growled. "Hey Jasper, think fast." He swept his rifle up to aim and fired at our brother point blank with a deafening crack of false thunder. Jasper moved to dart away as soon as he saw it coming, but the bullet smashed into his chest and sent him stumbling back several steps in surprise.

"YES! IT WORKS!" Emmett shouted, breaking into a touchdown celebration dance. "WOOO!"

"Good work," Jasper admitted. He smeared the purple paint down his shirt and fished the mangled bullet out of the new hole in the fabric. "But you better test it on Edward."

"Hold it!" Esme called out. "Are you saying we're shooting with _real_ guns, _real_ bullets, and you're just now testing them on your _brothers_?!"

"It really is fine, Esme," I said with a laugh. "I've been shot before. The gunpowder doesn't ignite anywhere near the target, so it's safe. Go ahead, Emmett, do your worst."

"Running start," he ordered, and I took off at top speed. He took aim and traced my flight around the field for a fraction of a second before pulling the trigger. I was instantly knocked off my feet.

"Oh, I like it," Rosalie said.

"How fast _is_ that thing?" I asked, running back up to everyone.

"Four thousand feet per second out the muzzle," Emmett said with a feral grin. "Sixty-eight years and it's still the fastest cartridge on the commercial market. I figure if it can hit a muskrat, it can catch a vampire."

Jasper gave a low whistle, looking over his rifle again with new respect. "You know, the last time I fired a real gun, I had to rip open the powder canister with my teeth."

"So did I," Carlisle said thoughtfully. "But I also had to blow on a match cord to get it burning. It must have taken me the better part of a minute to set up a single shot." He examined one of the modified bullets closely. "You've really outdone yourself this time, Emmett. This is excellent work." He clapped Emmett on the shoulder and Rosalie stood on her tiptoes to give Emmett a kiss on the cheek.

"My mad scientist," Esme said, jumping with her rifle in one hand to give Emmett a fierce hug.

He grinned, catching her and spinning her around. "So you'll play?"

"I will."

"You may even be able to catch Alice with these bullets," Carlisle mused.

"And the best part is that the paint splatters will be smaller," Emmett said excitedly. "So we can shoot each other _way more_ and still keep score! Speaking of Alice..." He raised his eyebrows, silently asking me where she and our other two players were.

"She's just coming," I said, turning around to look back east where the first tickle of Alice's mental voice was just now coming from. While we waited for her arrival and for the clouds to break, Emmett showed us all how to load the rifles. The magazines only held five rounds at a time, so Emmett also had an armful of bandoliers for each of us. He strapped two across his own chest, looking like some kind of giant undead Rambo. He brandished his rifle and snarled for the camera, which he had asked Esme to bring. Only Emmett.

"We're here!" Alice sang out. The first flash of lightning illuminated her deer-like burst out of the trees. "Jazz, I brought us a couple more teammates! Surprise!"

"Peter! Charlotte!" Jasper called out, rushing over to greet his friends. There was the usual clamor of greetings and handshakes and hugs, punctuated this time by the thunder of gunshots as we all tried them out. Esme turned out to be a natural, hitting a shocked Carlisle right between the eyes on her first try.

The rain was coming down heavily now. It was decided that Alice, Jasper, Peter, and Charlotte would play against the rest of us: Southern Wars Vets versus Cullens. There was some debate over their team name, what with Alice on the roster, but then Carlisle pointed out that she had technically seen more of the wars than Peter and Charlotte combined.

The combination of Emmett and Alice's surprises was exactly what we all needed after a hard week. What with the paint and the rain and the mud and the slipping and sliding and the extra fun that Peter and Charlotte brought to the game, we all spent a pleasant afternoon hunting and shooting each other silly. My gift still came into play easily enough, except when someone was actually shooting at me, but Alice's was neutralized to a refreshing degree—so much so that the vets were getting creamed and Rosalie had to go over to their team to even things out.

By the third hour, we were almost out of bullets, but it really didn't matter. It turned out paintball was one of the sports where we should have split up the couples between the teams, because all the scattering and hiding meant the couples kept finding little love nests throughout the playing field and ignoring their teammates. Rosalie and Emmett's rendezvous in the treetops was especially treasonous, what with their being on different teams, but it ended with a spectacular marital shootout that left them both more orange and purple than not. Still, it was annoying... until I suddenly realized the strategic value of being single and promptly abandoned the field to get myself the first shower back home. I even had to use shampoo for once, what with all the paint in my hair, and even then, it took nearly half an hour to get it all out. It was a grand thing, having a long, hot shower all to myself without anyone shouting for me to hurry up.

My hair was so fuzzy after its torture that I decided to forage around in Alice's bathroom closet and borrow some hair gel. I usually didn't bother; my hair did what it liked. Esme liked to tease me that I was still recovering from her ruthless habit of making me use pomade back in the '30s, and she wasn't wrong. The eighties had been a rather cathartic decade in particular when it came to letting my haystack hair live free and wild. In any case, we teenage vampires couldn't be beat for our dogmatic refusal to pick up the personal habits our mothers insisted on instilling in us.

But I really did look like something had built a nest on my head. It was as good a time as any to try a new look. I wrestled a comb through my hair and slicked everything back like in the old days. The smell was much better, I had to admit. Then I swept everything forward the wrong way, jammed whole fistfuls of hair out of formation, and gave the mirror a defiant grin. A few extra streaks of gel and tweaks to the ends, and I had an anime-inspired style guaranteed to shock Esme to the rafters.

"Alice," I growled, flipping through the clothes in my closet a moment later. Hardly any of them had been there this morning; no wonder she had been late getting back. She always bought clothes for everyone, but Jasper and I had the dubious privilege of having no say whatsoever over our closets. It was all well and good for Alice to pick out her husband's clothes, but shouldn't a bachelor be allowed some independence?

"Yes, dear brother?" Alice sang, zipping up the stairs. She laughed freely at my gel creation.

"You're not one to talk," I said, tweaking a paint-soaked lock of her hair. "And _where_ are my clothes? You know I liked those brown trousers—"

"Any man who still says 'trousers' in 2003 is not entitled to control his own wardrobe," Alice said briskly. "You've been updated, deal with it. You're welcome!" She flounced out of the room, plucking the bottle of hair gel off my dresser as she went.

I growled again, flipping through shirt after shirt, looking for something to wear besides a towel. Something uncharacteristic caught my eye that had been hung in the back of the new arrivals like an afterthought: a sleeveless white dress shirt, of all things. Where on earth was I supposed to wear this? Cullen fashion was all about blending in—vague colors that wouldn't contrast too much with our pallor, maximum skin coverage, nothing too forward or backward of the current decade's norms. I wore beige and light gray often enough, but white? Sleeveless? The thing was not only hideous; it was designed to reveal as much skin as possible.

"What's this for?" I called out, holding up the anomalous shirt.

Alice was in the shower already, but she snuck a quick vision to see what I was holding up. _I don't know_ , she thought distractedly. _It looked nice on the model._

I was never going to wear this thing. I turned to chuck it into the trash can, but Alice wouldn't have it. _No, keep it! You never know. You might want it someday. And you might have left me some hot water!_

I thought briefly about mutiny, but decided to follow orders after all and stuck the shirt back in the recesses of my closet. We were all in better moods now and I didn't want to pick a fight. Everyone else was trickling in now, barring Carlisle and Esme, who had gone on a dinner date in the thick of the forest. Peter and Charlotte were also thinking about dinner—Alice's warp speed mission to retrieve them from L.A. last night hadn't given them a chance to feed before coming like they usually did—but they were determined to stay for at least a couple of days.

Despite the fact that the Denalis were the only vampires that we thought of as family, Peter and Charlotte were our most frequent visitors. They had been confused and, frankly, a little put off by our human ways when they had first met up with us in '69, but now they enjoyed coming, and we enjoyed having them. Having _anyone_ over was a rare treat, and their visits in particular always left Jasper feeling more at home than he usually did. There was something about rehashing the bad old days with his fellow veterans that made him remember how lucky he was to be living the "unnatural lifestyle" that he did, as Peter liked to put it.

.

.

.

Esme didn't disappoint. The minute she walked in the door, she stopped in her tracks and let out a little gasp. I turned on the piano bench and gave her a cheeky grin.

"Edward, what on _earth_ have you done to your hair?" she demanded.

"Don't you like it?" I asked innocently.

"No, it looks terrible! Tell him, Carlisle!"

Carlisle put up his hands in surrender and continued on up the stairs. Esme darted over, determined to smooth my hair back down. I dodged and batted her hand away, snickering. The new hairstyle was a keeper, all right.

After everyone was cleaned up, we all gathered in the living room. We laid out the clothes we had worn during the game and tallied up our scores. We had never gotten around to counting the paint splatters on our skin and hair before removing the evidence, so those were discounted. The Southern Wars Vets were declared the winners in the end, which boosted Jasper's morale even more. Emmett argued the call, complaining that Rosalie's switch had given them too much of an advantage and that his size had given him an unfair disadvantage. But he, too, was relieved that how everyone's bad mood had lifted, so he dropped his challenge with uncharacteristic grace. He really was the hero of the day, and he knew it, so his pride was satisfied.

"It's going to storm again tomorrow around three," Alice announced. "Baseball?"

Everyone agreed, since having two extra players would make the game better than usual. Emmett admitted he hadn't picked out a field yet this time around.

"What about that big clearing that sits north of the Hoh ranger station?" Rosalie suggested. "You know, the one we used to use as a bowling alley last time we were here?"

I shook my head. "That's a little close to the treaty line, isn't it?"

"The wolves are gone, remember?" she said, rolling her eyes. "Nobody cares where we go."

"Wait a minute," Carlisle said. "What bowling alley?"

"Well, uh," Emmett said, rubbing the back of his neck, "we may have neglected to tell you that we were using it as a bowling alley last time..."

"Emmett," Carlisle sighed. "I specifically told you all not to venture that close to the treaty line unless you had a good reason to. October the twenty-fifth, 1936."

"Ah yes, the week of ridiculously overprotective house rules," I recalled, leaning back into my half of the couch with an air of elderly nostalgia. Peter and Charlotte looked back and forth between all of us, confused.

"Hey! Bowling is a good reason!" Emmett protested.

"And we never smelled werewolf scent once in all the times we went there," Rosalie added. "And, as I've already pointed out, the wolves are gone. I really don't see why we're keeping the treaty at all if no one knows what we are."

"Out of respect for Ephraim's wishes," Carlisle said. "That treaty wasn't just about keeping us and wolves apart for everyone's safety. It was about keeping vampires away from his loved ones. And at least one person knows who we are—Billy Black. I spoke with him on the telephone a few weeks ago before we came down from Alaska."

"Whatever for?" Esme said. "He might not have known the truth about us before speaking with you. Maybe it would have been better not to make contact."

"It was just a formality," I said in Carlisle's defense. "And Carlisle felt him out carefully to make sure he wasn't telling Billy anything he didn't already know."

"It was also another way of checking to see whether or not the wolves were still around—after all, considering his genealogy, Billy himself would probably be one of them, even the alpha," Carlisle said. "I didn't directly ask, but I think that if that were the case, Billy would have been quick to tell me how prepared they were. As it was, the wolves never came up and Billy made no protest to our plans. Granted, he didn't sound too happy about there being two more of us this time... In any case, Edward and I had already confirmed that there was no werewolf scent along the treaty line, or anywhere else on our side of the peninsula."

"So, the clearing?" Rosalie said.

Carlisle nodded. "I suppose it's all right. But I'd still like us all to keep our distance from the treaty line itself. If our scents were thick there, even a human who knew what to smell for might notice. There's no need to make anyone uncomfortable. Emmett," he added, spearing my brother with a pointed look, "that means no sports or hunting along the line. Is that clear?"

"Fine, fine."

"Why did you come back here at all if someone knows what you are?" Charlotte asked. "Isn't that... bending the law a little?"

"Not really," I said. "It's not like we told anyone _new_ about it. And we came back because this is one of the locations we all enjoyed."

"And because we were supposed to come here," Alice piped up from her spot on the stairs, two steps down from where Jasper sat. Everyone turned to look at her.

"What do you mean by that?" Peter asked.

She shrugged, locking down her thoughts. "Just a feeling. I don't know what it means."

"If you don't know what it means, then why do you keep hiding your thoughts about it?" I asked her, frowning.

Alice hummed to herself and examined her new nail polish, switching her thinking completely into Korean. She wouldn't even let me see whatever visions were prompting her intuition.

"Alice," I said testily. "At the very least, you—"

"Leave her alone, Edward," Jasper said abruptly. "You know it's not always time for her to tell us."

I threw up my hands. "Fine! Far be it from me to mess with destiny!"

Peter and Charlotte shared a look of incredulity. _They get weirder every time we come here_ , Peter thought, shaking his head. I chuckled good-naturedly at the thought, earning another bewildered glance. Peter secretly worried that our diet was unhealthy—that it was only a matter of centuries before we went fully insane. His "evidence" was the fact that we went to such lengths to carve out as normal a life as possible for ourselves and that our mannerisms were more human than other vampires. Since Carlisle acted the most human and had also been on the animal diet the longest, and Jasper was the inverse on both counts, Peter figured that proved his theory.

Ridiculous. But I'd have to tell Carlisle later about Peter's impression and see what he thought; if slowly getting "weirder" meant we were slowly becoming more human, we would be more than happy to be guilty as charged.

* * *

**Another note to new readers: if you'd like to read more about Peter and Charlotte's impressions of the Cullens, the "Mysterious Island" one-shot (chapter 30) details their first meeting with Alice and the Cullens in 1969.**


End file.
